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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 6 

Editors : 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
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IRISH 
NATIONALITY 



BY 



ALICE STOPFORD GREEN 

AUTHOR OF " TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 
"HENRY II," **THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND N ORG ATE 



Copyright, 191 i, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 









THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



©CI.A286816 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I The Gaels in Ireland ...«.« 7 

II Ireland and Europe 29 

III The Irish Mission ....... 40 

IV Scandinavians in Ireland . . . , . 57 
V The First Irish Revival 77 

VI The Norman Invasion 96 

VII The Second Irish Revival . , . . Ill 

VIII The Taking of the Land ..... 125 

IX The National Faith of the Irish . , 141 

X Rule of the English Parliament , . 158 

XI The Rise of a New Ireland . . . . 182 

XII An Irish Parliament 198 

XIII Ireland under the Union 219 

Some Irish Writers on Irish History 255 



IN MEMORY 

OF 

THE IRISH DEAD 



IRISH NATIONALITY 

CHAPTER I 

THE GAELS IN IRELAND 

Ireland lies the last outpost of Europe 
against the vast flood of the Atlantic Ocean; 
unlike all other islands it is circled round 
with mountains, whose precipitous cliffs ris- 
ing sheer above the water stand as bulwarks 
thrown up against the immeasurable sea. 

It is commonly supposed that the fortunes 
of the island and its civilisation must by 
nature hang on those of England. Neither 
history nor geography allows this theory. 
The life of the two countries was widely 
separated. Great Britain lay turned to the 
east; her harbours opened to the sunrising, 
and her first traflSc was across the narrow 
waters of the Channel and the German Sea. 
But Ireland had another aspect; her natural 

7 



8 IRISH NATIONALITY 

harbours swelled with the waves of the 
Atlantic, her outlook was over the ocean, 
and long before history begins her sailors 
braved the perils of the Gaulish sea. The 
peoples of Britain, Celts and English, came 
to her from the opposite lowland coasts; the 
people of Ireland crossed a wider ocean-track, 
from northern France to the shores of the 
Bay of Biscay. The two islands had a 
different history; their trade-routes were 
not the same; they lived apart, and developed 
apart their civilisations. 

We do not know when the Gaels first 
entered Ireland, coming according to ancient 
Irish legends across the Gaulish sea. One 
invasion followed another, and an old Irish 
tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as 
beginning in the fourth century B.C. They 
drove the earlier peoples, the Iberians, from 
the stupendous stone forts and earthen en- 
trenchments that guarded cliffs and moun- 
tain passes. The name of Erin recalls the 
ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the 
new rulers, more in number than their con- 
querors. The Gaels gave their language and 
their organisation to the country, while 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 9 

many customs and traditions of the older 
race lingered on and penetrated the new 
people. 

Over a thousand years of undisturbed life 
lay before the Gaels, from about 300 B.C. to 
800 A.D. The Roman Empire which overran 
Great Britain left Ireland outside it. The 
barbarians who swept over the provinces of 
the empire and reached to the great Roman 
Wall never crossed the Irish Sea. 

Out of the grouping of the tribes there 
emerged a division of the island into districts 
made up of many peoples. Each of the prov- 
inces later known as Ulster, Leinster, Mun- 
ster and Connacht had its stretch of seaboard 
and harbours, its lakes and rivers for fishing, 
its mountain strongholds, its hill pastures, 
and its share of the rich central plain, where 
the cattle from the mountains "used to go in 
their running crowds to the smooth plains 
of the province, towards their sheds and their 
full cattle-fields." All met in the middle of 
the island, at the Hill of Usnech, where the 
Stone of Division still stands. There the 
high-king held his court, as the chief lord in 
the confederation of the many states. The 



10 IRISH NATIONALITY 

rich lands of Meath were the high-king's 
domain. 

Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric con- 
flicts as of giants by which the peoples fixed 
the boundaries of their power. They tell 
of Conor Mac Nessa who began to reign in 
the year that Mark Antony and Cleopatra 
died, and of his sister's son Cuchulain, the 
champion of the north, who went out to 
battle from the vast entrenchments still seen 
in Emain Macha near Armagh. Against him 
Queen Maeve gathered at her majestic fort 
of Rathcroghan in Roscommon fifteen hun- 
dred royal mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers 
— a woman comely and white-faced, with 
gold yellow hair, her crimson cloak fastened 
at the breast with a gold pin, and a spear 
flaming in her hand, as she led her troops 
across the Boyne. The battles of the heroes 
on the Boyne and the fields of Louth, the 
thronged entrenchments that thicken round 
the Gap of the North and the mountain pass 
from Dundalk and Newry into the plains of 
Armagh and Tyrone, show how the soldiers' 
line of march was the same from the days of 
Cuchulain to those of William of Orange. 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 11 

The story tells how the whole island shared 
in the great conflict, to the extreme point of 
Munster, where a rival of Cuchulain, Curoi 
son of Dare, had sent his knights and war- 
riors through all Ireland to seek out the 
greatest stones for his fortress, on a shelf of 
rock over two thousand feet above the sea 
near Tralee. The Dublin Museum preserves 
relics of that heroic time, the trappings of 
war-chariots and horses, arms and ornaments. 

Amid such conflicts the Connacht kings 
pressed eastward from Usnech to Tara, and 
fixed there the centre of Irish life. 

The Gaelic conquerors had entered on a 
wealthy land. Irish chroniclers told of a 
vast antiquity, with a shadowy line of mon- 
archs reaching back, as they boasted, for 
some two thousand years before Christ: 
they had legends of lakes springing forth in 
due order; of lowlands cleared of wood, the 
appearance of rivers, the making of roads 
and causeways, the first digging of wells: 
of the making of forts; of invasions and 
battles and plagues. They told of the smelt- 
ing of gold near the Liffey about 1500 B.C. 
and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups 



n IRISH NATIONALITY 

and brooches of gold and silver, and silver 
shields, and golden chains for the necks of 
kings; and of the discovery of dyes, purple 
and blue and green, and how the ranks of 
men were distinguished henceforth by the 
colour of their raiment. They had traditions 
of foreign trade — of an artificer drowned 
while bringing golden ore from Spain, and 
of torques of gold from oversea, and of a 
lady's hair all ablaze with Alpine gold. 
Later researches have in fact shown that 
Irish commerce went back some fifteen hun- 
dred years before our era, that it was the 
most famous gold-producing country of the 
west, that mines of copper and silver were 
worked, and that a race of goldsmiths prob- 
ably carried on the manufacture of bronze 
and gold on what is now the bog of Cullen. 
Some five hundred golden ornaments of old 
times have been gathered together in the 
Dublin Museum in the last eighty years, a 
scanty remnant of what have been lost or 
melted down; their weight is five hundred 
and seventy ounces against a weight of 
tewnty ounces in the British Museum from 
England, Scotland, and Wales. 



THE GAELS IN lEELAND 13 

The earth too was fruitful. The new 
settlers, who used iron tools instead of bronze, 
could clear forests and open plains for tillage. 
Agriculture was their pride, and their legends 
told of stretches of corn so great that deer 
could shelter in them from the hounds, and 
nobles and queens drove chariots along their 
far-reaching lines, while multitudes of reapers 
were at work cutting the heads of the grain 
with the little sickles which we may still see 
in the Dublin Museum. 

But to the Irish the main interest of the 
Gaels lies in their conception of how to create 
an enduring state or nation. 

The tribal system has been much derided 
as the mark of a savage people, or at least 
of a race unable to advance beyond political 
infancy into a real national existence. This 
was not true of the Gaels. Their essential 
idea of a state, and the mode of its govern- 
ment and preservation, was different from 
that of mediseval Europe, but it was not 
uncivilised. 

The Roman Empire stamped on the minds 
of its subject peoples, and on the Teutonic 
barbarians who became its heirs, the notion 



14 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of a state as an organisation held together, 
defended, governed and poHced, by a central 
ruler; while the sovereign was supreme in the 
domain of force and maintenance of order, 
whatever lay outside that domain — art, 
learning, history and the like — were second- 
ary matters which might be left to the people. 
The essential life of the nation came to be 
expressed in the will and power of its master. 
The Gaelic idea was a wholly different one. 
The law with them was the law of the people. 
They never lost their trust in it. Hence they 
never exalted a central authority, for their 
law needed no such sanction. While the 
code was one for the whole race, the adminis- 
tration on the other hand was divided into 
the widest possible range of self-governing 
communities, which were bound together 
in a willing federation. The forces of union 
were not material but spiritual, and the life 
of the people consisted not in its military 
cohesion but in its joint spiritual inheritance 
— in the union of those who shared the same 
tradition, the same glorious memory of 
heroes, the same unquestioned law, and the 
same pride of literature. Such an instinct 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 15 

of national life was neither rude nor con- 
temptible, nor need we despise it because it 
was opposed to the theory of the middle ages 
in Europe. At the least the Irish tribal 
scheme of government contained as much 
promise of human virtue and happiness as 
the feudal scheme which became later the 
political creed of England, but which was 
never accepted in Ireland. Irish history can 
only be understood by realising this intense 
national life with its sure basis on the broad 
self-government of the people. 

Each tribe was supreme within its own 
borders; it elected its own chief, and could 
depose him if he acted against law. The 
land belonged to the whole community, which 
kept exact pedigrees of the families who had 
a right to share in the ground for tillage or in 
the mountain pasturage; and the chief had 
no power over the soil save as the elected 
trustee of the people. The privileges of the 
various chiefs, judges, captains, historians, 
poets, and so on, were handed down from 
generation to generation. In all these matters 
no external power could interfere. The tribe 
owed to the greater tribe above it nothing 



16 IRISH NATIONALITY 

but certain fixed dues, such as aid in road- 
making, in war, in ransom of prisoners and 
the Hke. 

The same right of self-government extended 
through the whole hierarchy of states up 
to the Ardri or high-king at the head. The 
"hearth of Tar a" was the centre of all the 
Gaelic states, and the demesne of the Ardri. 
"This then is my fostermother," said the 
ancient sage, " the island in which ye are, 
even Ireland, and the familiar knee of this 
island is the hill on which ye are, namely, 
Tara." There the Ardri was crowned at the 
pillar-post. At Tara, "the fort of poets 
and learned men," the people of all Ireland 
gathered at the beginning of each high-king's 
reign, and were entertained for seven days 
and nights — kings and ollaves together 
round the high-king, warriors and reavers, to- 
gether, the youths and maidens and the proud 
foolish folk in the chambers round the doors, 
while outside was for young men and maidens 
because their mirth used to entertain them. 
Huge earthen banks still mark the site of 
the great Hall, seven hundred and sixty feet 
long and ninety feet wide, with seven doors 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 17 

to east and as many more to west; where 
kings and chiefs sat each under his own 
shield, in crimson cloaks with gold brooches, 
with girdles and shoes of gold, and spears 
with golden sockets and rivets of red bronze. 
The Ardri, supreme lord and arbitrator 
among them, was surrounded by his coun- 
cillors — the law-men or brehons, the bards 
and chroniclers, and the druids, teachers and 
men of science. He was the representative 
of the whole national life. But his power 
rested on the tradition of the people and on 
the consent of the tribes. He could impose 
no new law; he could demand no service 
outside the law. 

The political bond of union, which seemed 
so loose, drew all its strength from a body of 
national tradition, and a universal code of 
law, which represented as it were the common 
mind of the people, the spontaneous creation 
of the race. Separate and independent as the 
tribes were, all accepted the one code which 
had been fashioned in the course of ages by 
the genius of the people. The same law was 
recited in every tribal assembly. The same 
traditions and genealogies bound the tribes 



18 IRISH NATIONALITY 

together as having a single heritage of heroic 
descent and fame. The preservation of 
their common history was the concern of 
the whole people. One of the tales pictures 
their gathering at Tara, when before the 
men of Ireland the ancients related their 
history, and Ireland's chief scholars heard 
and corrected them by the best tradition. 
"Victory and blessings attend you, noble 
sirs," the men of Erin said; "for such in- 
struction it was meet that we should gather 
ourselves together." And at the recit- 
ing of the historic glories of their past, 
the whole congregation arose up together 
"for in their eyes it was an augmenting of 
the spirit and an enlargement of the mind." 
To preserve this national tradition a 
learned class was carefully trained. There 
were schools of lawyers to expound the law; 
schools of historians to preserve the genealo- 
gies, the boundaries of lands, and the rights 
of classes and families; and schools of poets 
to recite the traditions of the race. The 
learned men were paid at first by the gifts 
of the people, but the chief among them were 
later endowed with a settled share of the 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 19 

tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the fam- 
ily held the land, they were bound to train up 
in each generation that one of the house- 
hold who was most fit to carry on learning, 
and thus for centuries long lines of distin- 
guished men added fame to their country 
and drew to its schools students from far and 
wide. Through their work the spirit of the 
Irish found national expression in a code of 
law which showed not only extraordinarily 
acute and trained intelligence but a true 
sense of equity, in a literary language of great 
richness and of the utmost musical beauty, 
and in a system of meterical rules for poets 
shaped with infinite skill. The Irish nation 
had a pride in its language beyond any 
people in Europe outside of the Greeks and 
Homans. 

While each tribe had its schools, these were 
linked together in a national system. Pro- 
fessors of every school were free of the island; 
it was the warrior's duty to protect them as 
they moved from court to court. An ancient 
tale tells how the chiefs of Emain near 
Armagh placed sentinels along the Gap of the 
North to turn back every poet who sought to 



20 IRISH NATIONALITY 

leave the country and to bring on their way 
with honour every one who sought to enter 
in. There was no stagnation where compe- 
tition extended over the whole island. The 
greatest of the teachers were given the dignity 
of "Professors of all the Gaels." Learned 
men in their degrees ranked with kings and 
chiefs, and high-professors sat by the high- 
king and shared his honours. The king, said 
the laws, "could by his mere word decide 
against every class of persons except those of 
the two orders of religion and learning, who 
are of equal value with himself." 

It is in this exaltation of learning in the 
national life that we must look for the real 
significance of Irish history — the idea of a 
society loosely held in a political sense, but 
bound together in a spiritual union. The 
assemblies which took place in every province 
and every petty state were the guarantees 
of the national civilization. They were 
periodical exhibitions of everything the peo- 
ple esteemed — democracy, aristocracy, king- 
craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, 
law, sport, religion, display, even rustic 
buffoonery. The years between one festival 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 21 

and another were spent in serious preparation 
for the next; a multitude of maxims were 
drawn up to direct the conduct of the people. 
So deeply was their importance felt that the 
Irish kept the tradition diligently, and even 
in the darkest times of their history, down 
to the seventeenth century, still gathered to 
"meetings on hills" to exercise their law 
and hear their learned men. 

In the time of the Roman Empire, there- 
fore, the Irish looked on themselves as one 
race, obedient to one law, united in one 
culture and belonging to one country. Their 
unity is symbolised by the great genealogical 
compilations in which all the Gaels are traced 
to one ancestry, and in the collections of 
topographical legends dealing with hundreds 
of places, where every nook and corner of the 
island is supposed to be of interest to the 
whole of Ireland. The tribal boundaries were 
limits to the material power of a chief and 
to that only: they were no barriers to the 
national thought or union. The learned man 
of the clan was the learned man of the Gaelic 
race. By all the higher matters of language 
and learning, of equity and history, the people 



22 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of Ireland were one. A noble figure told the 
unity of their land within the circuit of the 
ocean. The Three Waves of Erin, they said, 
smote upon the shore with a foreboding roar 
when danger threatened the island; Cleena's 
wave called to Munster at an inlet near Cork, 
while Tonn E,ury at Dundrum and Tonn 
Tuaithe at the mouth of the Bann sounded 
to the men of Ulster. 

The weaknesses of the Irish system are 
apparent. The numerous small territories 
were tempted, like larger European states, 
to raid borders, to snatch land or booty, and 
to suffer some expense of trained soldiers. 
Candidates for the chief dom had to show 
their fitness, and "a young lord's first spoil" 
was a necessary exploit. There were wild 
plundering raids in the summer nights; dis- 
orders were multiplied. A country divided 
in government was weakened for purposes 
of offence, or for joint action in military 
matters. These evils were genuine, but they 
have been exaggerated. Common action was 
hindered, not mainly by human contentions, 
but by the forests and marshes, lakes and 
rivers in flood that lay over a country heavy 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 23 

with Atlantic clouds. Riots and forays there 
were, among a martial race and strong men of 
hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no promi- 
nent example of mediaeval anarchy or dis- 
order. Local feuds were no greater than 
those which afflicted England down to the Nor- 
man Conquest and long after it; and which 
marked the life of European states and cities 
through the middle ages. The professional 
war bands of Fiana that hired themselves out 
from time to time were controlled and recog- 
nised by law, and had their special organi- 
sation and rites and rules of war. It has been 
supposed that in the passion of tribal disputes 
men mostly perished by murder and battle- 
slaughter, and the life of every generation 
was by violence shortened to less than the 
common average of thirty years. Irish gen- 
ealogies prove on the contrary that the gener- 
ations must be counted at from thirty-three 
to thirty-six years: the tale of kings, judges, 
poets, and householders who died peace- 
fully in an honoured old age, or from some 
natural accident, outruns the list of sudden 
murders or deaths in battle. Historical 
evidence moreover shows us a country of 



24 IRISH NATIONALITY 

widening cornfields, or growing commerce, 
where wealth was gathered, where art and 
learning swept like a passion over the people, 
and schools covered the land. Such indus- 
tries and virtues do not flourish in regions 
given over to savage strife. And it is signifi- 
cant that Irish chiefs who made great wars 
hired professional soldiers from oversea. 

If the disorders of the Irish system have 
been magnified its benefits have been for- 
gotten. All Irish history proved that the 
division of the land into separate military 
districts, where the fighting men knew every 
foot of ground, and had an intense local 
patriotism, gave them a power of defence 
which made conquest by the foreigner im- 
possible; he had first to exterminate the 
entire people. The same division into ad- 
ministrative districts gave also a singular 
authority to law. In mediaeval states, how- 
ever excellent were the central codes, they 
were only put in force just so far as the king 
had power to compel men to obey, and that 
power often fell very far short of the nominal 
boundaries of his kingdom. But in Ireland 
every community and every individual was 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 25 

interested in maintaining the law of the peo- 
ple, the protection of the common folk; nor 
were its landmarks ever submerged or de- 
stroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite 
of the changes that gradually covered the 
land with fenced estates, did actually pre- 
serve through all the centuries popular rights 
— fixity of rates for the land, fixity of tenure, 
security of improvement, refusal to allow 
great men to seize forests for their chase: 
under this people's law no Peasant Revolt 
ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against 
their lords. Rights of inheritance, due 
solemnities of election, were accurately pre- 
served. The authority and continuity of 
Irish law was recognised by wondering 
Englishmen — "They observe and keep such 
laws and statutes which they make upon hills 
in their country firm and stable, without 
breaking them for any favour or reward," said 
an English judge. "The Irish are more fear- 
ful to offend the law than the English or any 
other nation whatsoever." 

The tribal system had another benefit 
for Irishmen — the diffusion of a high intelli- 
gence among the whole people. A varied 



26 IRISH NATIONALITY 

education, spread over many centres, fer- 
tilized the general life. Every countryside 
that administered its own affairs must of 
needs possess a society rich in all the activities 
that go to make up a full community — chiefs, 
doctors, soldiers, judges, historians, poets, 
artists and craftsmen, skilled herds, tillers 
of the ground, raisers and trainers of horses, 
innkeepers, huntsmen, merchants, dyers and 
weavers and tanners. In some sequestered 
places in Ireland we can still trace the settle- 
ments made by Irish communities. They 
built no towns nor needed any in the modern 
sense. But entrenchments of earth, or 
"raths," thickly gathered together, mark a 
site where men lived in close association. 
Koads and paths great and small were 
maintained according to law, and boats 
carried travellers along rivers and lakes. So 
frequent were the journeys of scholars, 
traders, messengers from tribe to tribe, men 
gathering to public assemblies, craftsmen, 
dealers in hides and wool, poets, men and 
women making their circuit, that there was 
made in early time a "road-book " or itinerary, 
perhaps some early form of map, of Ireland. 



THE GAELS IN IRELAND 27 

This life of opportunity in thickly congre- 
gated country societies gave to Ireland its 
wide culture, and the incredible number of 
scholars and artificers that it poured out 
over Europe with generous ardour. The 
multitudinous centres of discussion scattered 
over the island, and the rapid intercourse 
of all these centres one with another, explain 
how learning broadened, and how Christian- 
ity spread over the land like a flood. It was 
to these country settlements that the Irish 
owed the richness of their civilisation, the 
generosity of their learning, and the passion 
of their patriotism. 

Ireland was a land then as now of intense 
contrasts, where equilibrium was maintained 
by opposites, not by a perpetual tending 
towards the middle course. In things politi- 
cal and social the Irish showed a conserv- 
atism that no intercourse could shake, side 
by side with eager readiness and great suc- 
cess in grasping the latest progress in arts or 
commerce. In their literature strikingly 
modern thoughts jostle against the most 
primitive crudeness; "Vested interests are 
shameless" was one of their old observations. 



28 IRISH NATIONALITY 

In Ireland the old survived beside the new, 
and as the new came by free assimilation old 
and new did not conflict. The balance of 
opposites gave colour and force to their 
civilisation, and Ireland until the thirteenth 
century and very largely until the seven- 
teenth century, escaped or survived the suc- 
cessive steam rollings that reduced Europe 
to nearly one common level. 

In the Irish system we may see the shaping 
of a true democracy — a society in which 
ever-broadening masses of the people are 
made intelligent sharers in the national life, 
and conscious guardians of its tradition. 
Their history is throughout a record of the 
nobility of that experiment. It would be a 
mechanical theory of human life which denied 
to the people of Ireland the praise of a true 
patriotism or the essential spirit of a nation. 



CHAPTER II, 

IRELAND AND EUROPE 
C. 100-C. 600 

The Roman Agricola had proposed the con- 
quest of Ireland on the ground that it would 
have a good effect on Britain by remov- 
ing the spectacle of liberty. But there was 
no Roman conquest. The Irish remained 
outside the Empire, as free as the men of 
Norway and Sweden. They showed that to 
share in the trade, the culture, and the civil- 
isation of an empire, it is not necessary to be 
subject to its armies or lie under its police 
control. While the neighbouring peoples re- 
ceived a civilisation imposed by violence 
and maintained by compulsion, the Irish were 
free themselves to choose those things which 
were suited to their circumstances and char- 
acter, and thus to shape for their people a 
liberal culture, democratic and national. 

29 



30 IRISH NATIONALITY 

It is important to observe what it was that 
tribal Ireland chose, and what it rejected. 

There was frequent trade, for from the 
first century Irish ports were well known to 
merchants of the Empire, sailing across the 
Gaulish sea in wooden ships built to confront 
Atlantic gales, with high poops standing from 
the water like castles, and great leathern sails 
— stout hulls steered by the born sailors of 
the Breton coasts or the lands of the Loire 
and Garonne. The Irish themselves served as 
sailors and pilots in the ocean traffic, and 
travelled as merchants, tourists, scholars and 
pilgrims. Trading-ships carried the wine of 
Italy and later of Provence, in great tuns in 
which three men could stand upright, to the 
eastern and the western coasts, to the Shan- 
non and the harbours of Down; and prob- 
ably brought tin to mix with Irish copper. 
Ireland sent out great dogs trained for war, 
wool, hides, all kinds of skins and furs, and 
perhaps gold and copper. But this material 
trade was mainly important to the Irish for 
the other wealth that Gaul had to give — 
art, learning, and religion. 

Of art the Irish craftsmen took all that Gaul 



IRELAND AND EUROPE 31 

possessed — ■ the great decorated trumpets of 
bronze used in the Loire country, the fine 
enamelKng in colours, the late-Celtic designs 
for ornaments of bronze and gold. Gold- 
smiths travelled oversea to bring back brace- 
lets, rings, draughtboards — "one half of its 
figures are yellow gold, the others are white 
bronze; its woof is of pearl; it is the wonder 
of smiths how it was wrought." They bor- 
rowed afterwards interlaced ornament for 
metal work and illuminated manuscripts. In 
such arts they outdid their teachers; their 
gold and enamel work has never been sur- 
passed, and in writing and illumination they 
went beyond the imperial artists of Con- 
stantinople. Their schools throughout the 
country handed on a great traditional art, 
not transitory or local, but permanent and 
national. 

Learning was as freely imported. The 
Latin alphabet came over at a very early 
time, and knowledge of Greek as a living 
tongue from Marseilles and the schools of Nar- 
bonne. By the same road from Marseilles 
Christianity must have come a hundred years 
or so before the mission of St. Patrick — a 



32 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Christianity carrying the traditions and rites 
and apocalypses of the East. It was from 
Gaul that St. Patrick afterwards sailed for his 
mission to Ireland. He came to a land where 
there were already men of erudition and 
"rhetoricians" who scoffed at his lack of 
education. The tribes of Ireland, free from 
barbarian invasions as they had been free 
from Roman armies, developed a culture 
which was not surpassed in the West or 
even in Italy. And this culture, like the art, 
was national, spread over the whole land. 

But while the Irish drew to themselves 
from the Empire art, learning, religion, they 
never adopted anything of Roman methods 
of government in church or state. The Ro- 
man centralized authority was opposed to 
their whole habit of thought and genius. 
They made, therefore, no change in their tri- 
bal administration. As early as the second 
century Irishmen had learned from Gaulish 
landowners to divide land into estates marked 
out with pillar-stones which could be bought 
and sold, and by 700 a.d. the country was 
scored with fences, and farms were freely 
bequeathed by will. But these estates seem 



IRELAND AND EUROPE 33 

still to have been administered according to 
the common law of the tribe, and not to have 
followed the methods of Roman proprietors 
throughout the Empire. In the same way the 
foreign learning brought into Ireland was 
taught through the tribal system of schools. 
Lay schools formed by the Druids in old time 
went on as before, where students of law and 
history and poetry grouped their huts round 
the dwelling of a famous teacher, and the 
poor among them begged their bread in 
the neighbourhood. The monasteries in like 
manner gathered their scholars within the 
"rath" or earthern entrenchment, and taught 
them Latin, canon law, and divinity. Mon- 
astic and lay schools went on side by side, as 
heirs together of the national tradition and 
language. The most venerable saints, the 
highest ecclesiastics, were revered also as 
guardians of Irish history and law, who wrote 
in Irish the national tales as competent scribes 
and not mere copyists — men who knew all the 
traditions, used various sources, and shaped 
their story with the independence of learning. 
No parallel can be found in any other country 
to the writing down of national epics in their 



34 IRISH NATIONALITY 

pagan form many centuries after the country 
had become Christian. In the same way 
European culture was not allowed to suppress 
the national language; clerics as well as lay- 
men preserved the native tongue in worship 
and in hymns, as at Clonmacnois where the 
praises of St. Columcille were sung, "some in 
Latin, which was beguiling, some in Irish, fair 
the tale"; and in its famous cemetery, where 
kings and scholars and pilgrims of all Ireland 
came to lie, there is but one Latin inscription 
among over two hundred inscribed grave slabs 
that have been saved from the many lost. 

Like the learning and the art, the new 
worship was adapted to tribal custom. 
Round the little monastic church gathered 
a group of huts with a common refectory, 
the whole protected by a great rampart of 
earth. The plan was familiar to all the Irish; 
every chief's house had such a fence, and 
every bardic school had its circle of thatched 
cells where the scholars spent years in study 
and meditation. Monastic "families" which 
branched off from the first house were 
grouped under the name of the original 
founder, in free federal union like that of 



IRELAND AND EUROPE 35 

the clans. As no land could be wholly alien- 
ated from the tribe, territory given to the 
monastery was not exempted from the com- 
mon law; it was ruled by abbots elected, like 
kings and judges of the tribe, out of the 
house which under tribal law had the right 
of succession; and the monks in some cases 
had to pay the tribal dues for the land and 
send out fighting men for the hosting. 

Never was a church so truly national. The 
words used by the common people were 
steeped in its imagery. In their dedications 
the Irish took no names of foreign saints, but 
of their own holy men. St. Bridgit became 
the "Mary of the Gael." There was scarcely 
a boundary felt between the divine country 
and the earthly, so entirely was the spiritual 
life commingled with the national. A legend 
told that St. Colman one day saw his monks 
reaping the wheat sorrowfully; it was the 
day of the celebration of Telltown fair, the 
yearly assembly of all Ireland before the high- 
king: he prayed, and angels came to him at 
once from heaven and performed three races 
for the toiling monks after the manner of the 
national feast. 



36 IRISH NATIONALITY 

The religion which thus sprang out of the 
heart of a people and penetrated every part 
of their national life, shone with a radiant 
spiritual fervour. The prayers and hymns 
that survive from the early church are in- 
spired by an exalted devotion, a profound and 
original piety, which won the veneration of 
every people who came into touch with the 
people of Ireland. On mountain cliffs, in 
valleys, by the water-side, on secluded 
islands, lie ruins of their churches and ora- 
tories, small in size though made by masons 
who could fit and dovetail into one another 
great stones from ten to seventeen feet in 
length; the little buildings preserved for cen- 
turies some ancient tradition of apostolic 
measurements, and in their narrow and 
austere dimensions, and their intimate solem- 
nity, were fitted to the tribal communities and 
to their unworldly and spiritual worship. An 
old song tells of a saint building, with a wet 
cloak about him — 



' Hand on a stone, hand lifted up. 
Knee bent to set a rock. 
Eyes shedding tears, other lamentation. 
And mouth praying." 



IRELAND AND EUROPE 37 

Piety did not always vanquish the pas- 
sions of a turbulent age. There were local 
quarrels and battles. In some hot temporal 
controversy, in some passionate religious 
rivalry, a monastic "rath" may have fallen 
back to its original use as a fort. Plunderers 
fell on a trading centre like Clonmacnois, 
where goods landed from the Shannon for 
transport across country offered a prize. 
Such things have been known in other lands. 
But it is evident that disturbances were not 
universal or continuous. The extraordinary 
work of learning carried out in the monastic 
lands, the sanctuary given in them for 
hundreds of years to innumerable scholars 
not of Ireland alone, shows the large peace 
that must have prevailed on their territories. 

The national tradition of monastic and lay 
schools preserved to Erin what was lost in 
the rest of Europe, a learned class of laymen. 
Culture was as frequent and honourable in 
the Irish chief or warrior as in the cleric. 
Gaiety and wit were prized. Oral tradition 
told for many centuries of a certain merry- 
man long ago, and yet he was a Christian, 
who could make all men he ever saw laugh 



38 IRISH NATIONALITY 

however sad they were, so that even his 
skull on a high stone in the churchyard 
brought mirth to sorrowful souls. 

We must remember, too, that by the 
Irish system certain forms of hostility were 
absolutely shut out. There is not a single 
instance in Irish history of the conflicts 
between a monastery and its lay dependents 
which were so frequent on the continent and 
in England — as, for example, at St. Albans, 
where the monks paved their church with the 
querns of the townsfolk to compel them to 
bring their corn to the abbey mill. Again, 
the broad tolerance of the church in Ireland 
never allowed any persecution for religion's 
sake, and thus shut the door on the worst 
form of human cruelty. At the invasion of 
the Normans a Norman bishop mocked to 
the archbishop of Cashel at the imperfec- 
tion of a church like the Irish which could 
boast of no martyr. "The Irish," answered 
the archbishop," have never been accustomed 
to stretch forth their hands against the 
saints of God, but now a people is come into 
this country that is accustomed and knows 
how to make martyrs. Now Ireland too 



IRELAND AND EUROPE 39 

will have martyrs." Finally, the Irish church 
never became, as in other lands, the servant, 
the ally, or the master of the state. It was 
the companion of the people, the heart of the 
nation. To its honour it never served as the 
instrument of political dominion, and it never 
was degraded from first to last by a war of 
religion. 

The free tribes of Ireland had therefore by 
some native instinct of democratic life re- 
jected for their country the organisation of 
the Roman state, and had only taken the 
highest forms of its art, learning, and reli- 
gion, to enrich their ancient law and tradi- 
tion: and through their own forms of social 
life they had made this culture universal 
among the people, and national. Such was 
the spectacle of liberty which the imperial 
Agricola had feared. 



CHAPTER III 

THE IRISH MISSION 
C, 560-C. 1000 

The fall of the Roman Empire brought 
to the Irish people new dangers and new 
opportunities. Goths and Vandals, Burgund- 
ians and Franks, poured west over Europe 
to the Atlantic shore, and south across the 
Mediterranean to Africa; while the English 
were pressing northward over Great Britain, 
driving back the Celts and creating a pagan 
and Teutonic England. Once more Ireland 
lay the last unconquered land of the West. 

The peoples that lay in a circle round the 

shores of the German Ocean were in the thick 

of human affairs, nations to right and left 

of them, all Europe to expand in. From the 

time when their warriors fell on the Roman 

Empire they rejoiced in a thousand years of 

uninterrupted war and conquest; and for the 

40* 



THE IRISH MISSION 41 

thousand years that followed traders, now 
from this shore of the German sea and now 
from that, have fought and trafficked over 
the whole earth. 

In Ireland, on the other hand, we see a 
race of the bravest warriors that ever fought, 
who had pushed on over the Gaulish sea to 
the very marge and limit of the world. Close 
at their back now lay the German invaders 
of Britain — a new wave of the human tide 
always flowing westward. Before them 
stretched the Atlantic, darkness and chaos; 
no boundary known to that sea. Even now 
as we stand to the far westward on the 
gloomy heights of Donegal, where the very 
grass and trees have a blacker hue, we seem 
to have entered into a vast antiquity, where 
it would be little wonder to see in the sombre 
solitude some strange shape of the primeval 
world, some huge form of primitive man's 
imagination. So closely did Infinity com- 
pass these people round that when the Irish 
sailor — St. Brendan or another — launched 
his coracle on the illimitable waves, in face of 
the everlasting storm, he might seem to pass 
over the edge of the earth into the vast Eter- 



42 IRISH NATIONALITY 

nity where space and time were not. We see 
the awful fascination of the immeasurable 
flood in the story of the three Irishmen that 
were washed on the shores of Cornwall and 
carried to King Alfred. "They came," 
iElfred tells us in his chronicle, "in a boat 
without oars from Hibernia, whence they had 
stolen away because for the love of God they 
would be on pilgrimage — they recked not 
where. The boat in which they fared was 
wrought of three hides and a half, and they 
took with them enough meat for seven nights." 

Ultimately withdrawn from the material 
business of the continent nothing again 
drew back the Irish to any share in the 
affairs of Europe save a spiritual call — a 
call of religion, of learning, or of liberty. 
The story of the Irish mission shows how 
they answered to such a call. 

The Teutonic invaders stopped at the Irish 
Sea. At the fall of the Empire, therefore, 
Ireland did not share in the ruin of its civili- 
sation. And while all continental roads were 
interupted, traffic from Irish ports still 
passed safely to Gaul over the ocean routes. 
Ireland therefore not only preserved her 



THE IRISH MISSION 43 

culture unharmed, but the way lay open for 
her missionaries to carry back to Europe the 
knowledge which she had received from it. In 
that mission we may see the strength and 
the spirit of the tribal civilisation. 

Two great leaders of the Irish mission were 
Columcille in Great Britain and Columbanus 
in Europe. In all Irish history there is no 
greater figure than St. Columcille — states- 
man and patriot, poet, scholar, and saint. 
After founding thirty-seven monasteries in 
Ireland, from Derry on the northern coast to 
Durrow near the Munster border, he crossed 
the sea in 563 to set up on the bare island of 
Hii or lona a group of reed-thatched huts 
peopled with Irish monks. In that wild 
debatable land, swept by heathen raids, amid 
the ruins of Christian settlements, began a 
work equally astonishing from the religious 
and the political point of view. The heathen 
Picts had marched westward to the sea, de- 
stroying the Celtic churches. The pagan 
English had set up in 547 a monarchy in 
Northumbria and the Lowlands, threatening 
alike the Picts, the Irish or "Scot" settle- 
ments along the coast, and the Celts of 



44 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Strathclyde. Against this world of war 
Columcille opposed the idea of a peaceful 
federation of peoples in the bond of Christian 
piety. He converted the king of the Picts at 
Inverness in 565, and spread Irish monasteries 
from Strathspey to the Dee, and from the Dee 
to the Tay. On the western shores about Can- 
tyre he restored the Scot settlement from Ire- 
land which was later to give its name to 
Scotland, and consecrated as king the Irish 
Aidan, ancestor of the kings of Scotland and 
England. He established friendship with the 
Britons of Strathclyde. From his cell at lona 
he dominated the new federation of Picts and 
Britons and Irish on both sides of the sea — 
the greatest missionary that Ireland ever sent 
out to proclaim the gathering of peoples in 
free association through the power of human 
brotherhood, learning, and religion. 

For thirty-four years Columcille ruled as 
abbot in lona, the high leader of the Celtic 
world. He watched the wooden ships with 
great sails that crossed from shore to shore; 
he talked with mariners sailing south from 
the Orkneys, and others coming north from 
the Loire with their tuns of wine, who told 



THE IRISH MISSION 45 

him European tidings, and how a town in 
Istria had been wrecked by earthquake. His 
large statesmanship, his lofty genius, the 
passionate and poetic temperament that filled 
men with awe and reverence, the splendid 
voice and stately figure that seemed almost 
miraculous gifts, the power of inspiring love 
that brought dying men to see his face once 
more before they fell at his feet in death, give 
a surpassing dignity and beauty to his life. 
"He could never spend the space of even one 
hour without study or prayer or writing, or 
some other holy occupation . . . and still in 
all these he was beloved by all." "Seasons 
and storms he perceived, he harmonised the 
moon's race with the branching sun, he was 
skilful in the course of the sea, he would count 
the stars of heaven." He desired, one of his 
poems tells us, "to search all the books that 
would be good for any soul"; and with his 
own hand he copied, it is said, three hundred 
books, sitting with open cell door, where the 
brethren, one with his butcher's knife, one 
with his milk pail, stopped to ask a blessing 
as they passed. 
After his death the Irish monks carried his 



46 IRISH NATIONALITY 

work over the whole of England. A heathen 
land lay before them, for the Roman mission- 
aries established in 597 by Augustine in 
Canterbury, speaking no English and hating 
"barbarism," made little progress, and after 
some reverses were practically confined to 
Kent. The first cross of the English border- 
land was set up in 635 by men from lona on 
a heather moorland called the Heaven-field, 
by the ramparts of the Roman Wall. Colum- 
ban monks made a second lona at Lindisf arne, 
with its church of hewn oak thatched with 
reeds after Irish tradition in sign of poverty 
and lowliness, and with its famous school of 
art and learning. They taught the English 
writing, and gave them the letters which were 
used among them till the Norman Conquest. 
Labour and learning went hand in hand. 
From the king's court nobles came, rejoicing 
to change the brutalities of war for the plough, 
the forge-hammer, the winnowing fan: waste 
places were reclaimed, the ports were crowded 
with boats, and monasteries gave shelter to 
travellers. For a hundred years wherever the 
monks of lona passed men ran to be signed 
by their hand and blessed by their voice. 



THE IRISH MISSION 47 

Their missionaries wandered on foot over 
middle England and along the eastern coast 
and even touched the Channel in Sussex. In 
662 there was only one bishop in the whole 
of England who was not of Irish consecration, 
and this bishop, Agilberct of Wessex, was a 
Frenchman who had been trained for years 
in Ireland. The great school of Malmesbury 
in Wessex was founded by an Irishman, as 
that of Lindisfarne had been in the north. 

For the first time also Ireland became 
known to Englishmen. Fleets of ships bore 
students and pilgrims, who forsook their na- 
tive land for the sake of divine studies. The 
Irish most willingly received them all, sup- 
plying to them without charge food and books 
and teaching, welcoming them in every school 
from Derry to Lismore, making for them a 
"Saxon Quarter" in the old university of 
Armagh. Under the influence of the Irish 
teachers the spirit of racial bitterness was 
checked, and a new intercourse sprang up 
between English, Picts, Britons, and Irish. 
For a moment it seemed as though the British 
islands were to be drawn into one peaceful 
confederation and communion and a common 



48 IRISH NATIONALITY 

worship bounded only by the ocean. The 
peace of Columcille, the fellowship of learning 
and of piety, rested on the peoples. 

Columcille had been some dozen years in 
lona when Columbanus (c. 575) left Bangor 
on the Belfast Lough, leading twelve Irish 
monks clad in white homespun, with long 
hair falling on their shoulders, and books 
hanging from their waists in leathern satchels. 
They probably sailed in one of the merchant 
ships trading from the Loire. Crossing Gaul 
to the Vosges Columbanus founded his monas- 
tery of Luxeuil among the ruined heaps of 
a Homan city, once the meeting-place of 
great highways from Italy and France, now 
left by the barbarians a wilderness for wild 
beasts. Other houses branched out into 
France and Switzerland. Finally he founded 
his monastery of Bobio in the Apennines, 
where he died in 615. 

A stern ascetic, aflame with religious pas- 
sion, a finished scholar bringing from Ireland 
a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, of 
rhetoric, geometry, and poetry, and a fine 
taste, Columbanus battled for twenty years 
with the vice and ignorance of a half-pagan 



THE IRISH MISSION 49 

Burgundy. Scornful of ease, indifferent to 
danger, astonished at the apathy of Italy as 
compared with the zeal of Ireland in teaching, 
he argued and denounced with "the freedom 
of speech which accords with the custom of 
my country." The passion of his piety so 
awed the peoples, that for a time it seemed 
as if the rule of Columbanus might outdo 
that of St. Benedict. It was told that in 
Rome Gregory the Great received him, and 
as Columbanus lay prostrate in the church 
the Pope praised God in his heart for having 
given such great power to so small a man. 
Instantly the fiery saint, detecting the secret 
thought, rose from his prayer to repudiate 
the slight: "Brother, he who depreciates the 
work depreciates the Author." 

For a hundred years before Columbanus 
there had been Irish pilgrims and bishops in 
Gaul and Italy. But it was his mission that 
first brought the national patriotism of Ire- 
land into conflict with the organisation of 
Rome in Europe. Christianity had come to 
Ireland from the East — tradition said from 
St. John, who was then, and is still, held in 
special veneration by the Irish; his flower. 



50 IRISH NATIONALITY 

St. John's wort, had for them pecuHar virtues, 
and from it came, it was said, the saffron hue 
as the national colour for their dress. It was 
a national pride that their date for celebrating 
Easter, and their Eastern tonsure from ear to 
ear, had come to them from St. John. Peter 
loved Jesus, they said, but it was John that 
Jesus loved — "the youth John, the foster- 
son of his own bosom" — "John of the 
Breast." It was with a very passion of 
loyalty that they clung to a national church 
which linked them to the beloved apostle, 
and which was the close bond of their whole 
race, dear to them as the supreme expression 
of their temporal and spiritual freedom, now 
illustrious beyond all others in Europe for 
the roll of its saints and of its scholars, and 
ennobled by the company of its patriots and 
the glory of Columcille. The tonsure and 
the Easter of Columbanus, however, shocked 
foreign ecclesiastics as contrary to the disci- 
pline of Rome, and he was required to re- 
nounce them. He vehemently protested his 
loyalty to St. John, to St. Columcille, and to 
the church of his fathers. It was an unequal 
argument. Ireland, he was answered, was a 



THE IRISH MISSION 51 

small island in a far corner of the earth: what 
was its people that they should fight against 
the whole world. The Europe of imperial 
tradition had lost comprehension of the 
passion of national loyalty: all that lay out- 
side that tradition was "barbarous," the 
Irish like the Saxons or the Huns. 

The battle that was thus opened was the 
beginning of a new epoch in Irish history. 
St. Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury 
(597), was ordered (603) to demand obedience 
to himself from the Celtic churches and the 
setting aside of their customs. The Welsh 
and the Irish refused to submit. Augustine 
had come to them from among the English, 
who were still pagan, and still fighting for the 
extermination of the Celts, and on his lips 
were threats of slaughter by their armies 
to the disobedient. The demand was renewed 
sixty years later, in a synod at Whitby in 
664. By that time Christianity had been 
carried over England by the Irish mission; 
on the other hand, the English were filled with 
imperial dreams of conquest and supremacy. 
English kings settled on the Roman province 
began to imitate the glories of Rome, to have 



52 IRISH NATIONALITY 

the Roman banner of purple and gold car- 
ried before them, to hear the name of "Em- 
peror of the whole of Britain," and to project 
the final subjugation to that "empire" of 
the Celt and Pictish peoples. The Roman 
organisation fell in with their habits of 
government and their ambitions. In the 
synod the tone of imperial contempt made 
itself heard against those marked out for 
conquest — Celts "rude and barbarous" — 
" Picts and Britons, accomplices in obstinacy 
in those two remote islands of the world." 
"Your father Columba," "of rustic sim- 
plicity," said the English leader, had "that 
Columba of yours," like Peter, the keeping 
of the keys of heaven .^^ With these first 
bitter words, with the condemnation of the 
Irish customs, and the sailing away of the 
Irish monks from Lindisfarne, discord began 
to enter in. Slowly and with sorrow the 
Irish in the course of sixty years abandoned 
their traditional customs and adopted the 
Roman Easter. But the work of Columcille 
was undone, and the spiritual bond by which 
the peoples had been united was for ever 
loosened. English armies marched ravaging 



THE IRISH MISSION 53 

over the north, one of them into Ireland (684), 
"wasting that harmless nation which had 
always been most friendly to the English, 
not sparing even churches or monasteries." 
The gracious peace which had bound the 
races for a hundred and twenty years was 
broken, and constant wars again divided 
Picts, Scots, Britons, and Angles. 

Ireland, however, for four hundred years to 
come still poured out missionaries to Europe. 
They passed through England to northern 
France and the Netherlands; across the 
Gaulish sea and by the Loire to middle 
France; by the Rhine and the way of Luxeuil 
they entered Switzerland; and westward they 
reached out to the Elbe and the Danube, send- 
ing missionaries to Old Saxony, Thuringia, 
Bavaria, Salzburg and Carinthia; southwards 
they crossed the Alps into Italy, to Lucca, 
Fiesole, Rome, the hills of Naples, and 
Tarentum. Their monasteries formed rest- 
houses for travellers through France and 
Germany. Europe itself was too narrow for 
their ardour, and they journeyed to Jerusa- 
lem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the 
discovery of Iceland. No church of any land 



54 IRISH NATIONALITY 

has so noble a record in the astonishing work 
of its teachers, as they wandered over the 
ruined provinces of the empire among the 
pagan tribes of the invaders. In the High- 
lands they taught the Picts to compose hymns 
in their own tongue; in a monastery founded 
by them in Yorkshire was trained the first 
English poet in the new England; at St. Gall 
they drew up a Latin-German dictionary for 
the Germans of the Upper Rhine and Switzer- 
land, and even devised new German words to 
express the new ideas of Christian civilisation; 
near Florence one of their saints taught the 
natives how to turn the course of a river. 
Probably in the seventh and eighth centuries 
no one in western Europe spoke Greek who 
was not Irish or taught by an Irishman. No 
land ever sent out such impassioned teachers 
of learning, and Charles the Great and his 
successors set them at the head of the chief 
schools throughout Europe. 

We can only measure the originality of the 
Irish mission by comparing with it the work 
of other races. Roman civilisation had not 
inured its people to hardship, nor given them 
any interest in barbarians. When Augustine 



THE IRISH MISSION 55 

in 595 was sent on the English mission he 
turned back with loathing, and finally took 
a year for his journey. In 664^ no one could 
be found in Rome to send to Canterbury, till 
in 668 Theodore was fetched from Syria; he 
also took a year on his way. But the Irish 
missionaries feared nothing, neither hunger 
nor weariness nor the outlaws of the woods. 
Their succession never ceased. The death 
of one apostle was but the coming of another. 
The English missions again could not compare 
with the Irish. Every English missionary 
from the seventh to the ninth century had 
been trained under Irish teachers or had 
been for years in Ireland, enveloped by the 
ardour of their fiery enthusiasm; when this 
powerful influence was set aside English 
mission work died down for a thousand years 
or so. The Irish missionaries continued with- 
out a break for over six hundred years. 
Instead of the Irish zeal for the welfare of all 
peoples whatsoever, the English felt a special 
call to preach among those "from whom the 
English race had its origin," and their chief 
mission was to their own stock in Frisia. 
Finally, among Teutonic peoples politics 



56 IRISH NATIONALITY 

went hand in hand with Christianity. The 
Teutons were out to conquer, and in the lust 
of dominion a conqueror might make rehgion 
the sign of obedience, and enforce it by fire 
and water, viper and sword. But the Irish 
had no theory of dominion to push. A score 
of generations of missionaries were bred up 
in the tribal communities of Ireland, where 
men believed in voluntary union of men in 
a high tradition. Their method was one of 
persuasion for spiritual ends alone. The 
conception of human life that lay behind the 
tribal government and the tribal church of 
Ireland gave to the Irish mission in Europe 
a singular and lofty character. In the 
broad humanity that was the great dis- 
tinction of their people persecution had no 
part. No war of religion stained their faith, 
and no barbarities to man. 



CHAPTER IV 

SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 

800-1014 

For a thousand years no foreign host had 
settled in Erin. But the times of peace were 
ended. About 800 a.d. the Irish suffered their 
first invasion. 

The Teutonic peoples, triumphant con- 
querors of the land, had carried their victories 
over the Roman Empire to the edge of the 
seas that guarded Ireland. But fresh hordes 
of warriors were gathering in the north, 
conquerors of the ocean. The Scandinavians 
had sailed out on "the gulf's enormous 
abyss, where before their eyes the vanishing 
bounds of the earth were hidden in gloom." 
An old English riddle likened the shattering 
iceberg swinging down from Arctic waters to 
the terror of the pirate's war-ship — the 
leader on the prow as it plunged through the 

sea, calling to the land, shouting as he goes, 

57 



58 IRISH NATIONALITY 

with laughter terrible to the earth, swinging 
his sharp-edged sword, grim in hate, eager for 
slaughter, bitter in the battle-work. They 
came, "great scourers of the seas — a nation 
desperate in attempting the conquest of 
other realms." 

The Scandinavian campaigns of the ocean 
affected Ireland as no continental wars for 
the creation or the destruction of the Roman 
Empire had done. During two hundred years 
their national life, their learning, their civilisa- 
tion, were threatened by strangers. The social 
order they had built up was confronted with 
two new tests — violence from without, and 
an alien population within the island. We 
may ask how Irish civilisation met the trial. 

The Danes fell on all the shores of Eng- 
land from the Forth to the Channel, the 
land of the Picts northward, lona and the 
country of the Scots to the west, and Bret- 
land of the Britons from the Clyde to the 
Land's End: in Ireland they sailed up every 
creek, and shouldering their boats marched 
from river to river and lake to lake into every 
tribeland, covering the country with their 
forts, plundering the rich men's raths of their 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 59 

cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sack- 
ing the schools and monasteries and churches, 
and entering every great king's grave for 
buried treasure. Their heavy iron swords, 
their armour, their discipline of war, gave 
them an overwhelming advantage against 
the Irish with, as they said, bodies and necks 
and gentle heads defended only by fine linen. 
Monks and scholars gathered up their manu- 
scripts and holy ornaments, and fled away 
for refuge to Europe. 

These wars brought a very different fate 
to the English and the Irish. In England, 
when the Danes had planted a colony on every 
inlet of the sea (c. 800), they took horse 
and rode conquering over the inland plains. 
They slew every English king and wiped out 
every English royal house save that of 
Wessex; and in their place set up their own 
kings in Northumbria and East Anglia, and 
made of all middle England a vast "Dane- 
law," a land ruled by Danish law, and by 
confederations of Danish towns. At the 
last Wessex itself was conquered, and a 
Danish king ruled over all England (1013). 
In Ireland, on the other hand, the invincible 



60 IRISH NATIONALITY 

power of the tribal system for defence barred 
the way of invaders. Every foot of land was 
defended; every tribe fought for its own soil. 
There could be no subjection of the Irish 
clans except by their extermination. A Nor- 
wegian leader, Thorgils, made one supreme 
effort at conquest. He fixed his capital at 
Armagh and set up at its shrine the worship 
of Thor, while his wife gave her oracles from 
the high altar of Clonmacnois on the Shannon, 
in the prophetess's cloak set with stones to 
the hem, the necklace of glass beads, the 
staff, and the great skin pouch of charms. 
But in the end Thorgils was taken by the 
king of Meath and executed, being cast into 
Loch Nair. The Danes, who held long and 
secure possession of England, great part of 
Scotland, and Normandy, were never able 
to occupy permanently any part of Ireland 
more than a day's march from the chief 
stations of their fleets. Through two hun- 
dred years of war no Irish royal house was 
destroyed, no kingdom was extinguished, and 
no national supremacy of the Danes replaced 
the national supremacy of the Irish. 

The long war was one of "confused noise 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 61 

and garments rolled in blood." Ireland, 
whether they could conquer it or not, was of 
vast importance to the Scandinavians as a 
land of refuge for their fleets. Voyagers 
guided their way by the flights of birds from 
her shores ; the harbours of "the great island " 
sheltered them; her fields of corn, her cattle 
driven to the shore for the "strand-hewing," 
provisioned their crews; her woods gave 
timber for shipbuilding. Norwegians and 
Danes fought furiously for possession of the 
sea-ports, now against the Irish, now against 
each other. No victory or defeat counted 
beyond the day among the shifting and multi- 
plying fleets of new marauders that for ever 
swarmed round the coasts — emigrants who 
had flung themselves on the sea for freedom's 
sake to save their old laws and liberties, 
buccaneers seeking "the spoils of the sea," 
sea-kings roaming the ocean or gathering for 
a raid on Scotland or on France, stray com- 
panies out of work or putting in for a winter's 
shelter, boats of whale-fishers and walrus- 
killers, Danish hosts driven out of England or 
of Normandy. As "the sea vomited up floods 
of foreigners into Erin so that there was not a 



62 IRISH NATIONALITY 

point without a fleet," battle swung back- 
wards and forwards between old settlers and 
new pirates, between Norsemen and Danes, 
between both and the Irish. 

But the Scandinavians were not only sea- 
rovers, they were the greatest merchants that 
northern Europe had yet seen. From the 
time of Charles the Great to William the 
Conqueror, the whole commerce of the seas 
was in their hands. Eastward they pushed 
across Russia to the Black Sea, and carried 
back the wares of Asia to the Baltic; west- 
ward they poured along the coasts of Gaul by 
the narrow seas, or sailed the Atlantic from 
the Orkneys and Hebrides round the Irish 
coast to the Bay of Biscay. The new-made 
empire of Charles the Great was opening 
Europe once more to a settled life and the 
possibilities of traffic, and the Danish mer- 
chants seized the beginnings of the new 
trade. Ireland lay in the very centre of their 
seaways, with its harbours, its wealth, and 
its traditional commerce with France. Mer- 
chants made settlements along the coasts, 
and planted colonies over the inland country 
to supply the trade of the ports. They had 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 63 

come to Ireland for business, and they wanted 
peace and not war. They intermarried with 
the Irish, fostered their children, brought 
their goods, welcomed Irish poets into their 
forts, listening to Irish stories and taking 
new models for their own literature, and in 
war they joined with their Irish neighbours. 
A race of "Gall-Gaels," or "foreign Irish," 
grew up, accepted by the Irish as of their 
community. Between the two peoples there 
was respect and good- will. 

The enterprise of the sea-rovers and the 
merchant settlers created on Irish shores 
two Scandinavian * ' kingdoms ' ' — kingdoms 
rather of the sea than of the land. The 
Norsemen set up their moot on the Mound 
over the river Liffey (near where the Irish 
Parliament House rose in later days), and 
there created a naval power which reached 
along the coast from Waterford to Dundalk. 
The Dublin kingdom was closely connected 
with the Danish kingdom of Northumbria, 
which had its capital at York, and formed 
the common meeting-ground, the link which 
united the Northmen of Scandinavia and the 
Northmen of Ireland. A mighty confedera- 



64 IRISH NATIONALITY 

tion grew up. Members of the same house 
were kings in Dubhn, in Man, and in York. 
The Irish Channel swarmed with their fleets. 
The sea was the common highway which 
Knked the powers together, and the sea was 
held by fleets of swift long-ships with from 
ninety to a hundred and fifty rowers or fight- 
ing men on board. Dublin, the rallying-point 
of roving marauders, became the centre of a 
wide-flung war. Its harbour, looking east, 
was the mart of the merchant princes of the 
Baltic trade: there men of Iceland and of 
Norway landed with their merchandise or 
their plunder. 

"Limerick of the swift ships," "Limerick 
of the riveted stones," the kingdom lying 
on the Atlantic was a rival even to Dublin; 
kings of the same house ruled in Limerick and 
the Hebrides, and their fleets took the way 
of the wide ocean; while Norse settlements 
scattered over Limerick, Kerry and Tip- 
perary, organised as Irish clans and giving 
an Irish form to their names, maintained the 
inland trade. Other Munster harbours were 
held, some by the Danes, some by the Irish. 

The Irish were on good terms with the 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 65 

traders. They learned to build the new ships 
invented by the Scandinavians where both 
oars and sails were used, and traded in their 
own ports for treasures from oversea, silken 
raiment and abundance of wine. We read 
in 900 of Irishmen along the Cork shores 
"high in beauty, whose resolve is quiet 
prosperity," and in 950 of "Munster of the 
great riches," "Munster of the swift ships." 
On the other hand, the Irish never ceased 
from war with the sea-kings. From the time 
of Thorgils, high-kings of Tara one after 
another led the perpetual contest to hold 
Ireland and to possess Dublin. They sum- 
moned assemblies in north and south of the 
confederated chiefs. The Irish copied not 
only the Scandinavian building of war-ships, 
but their method of raising a navy by dividing 
the coast into districts, each of which had to 
equip and man ten ships, to assemble at the 
summons for the united war-fleet. Every 
province seems to have had its fleet. The 
Irish, in fact, learned their lesson so well that 
they were able to undertake the re-conquest 
of their country, and become leaders of 
Danish and Norse troops in war. The spirit 



66 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of the people rose high. From 900 their 
victories increased even amid disaster. Strong 
kings arose among them, good organisers and 
good fighters, and for a hundred years one 
leader followed hard on another. In 916, 
Niall, king of Tara, celebrated once more the 
assembly of Telltown, and led southern and 
northern O'Neills to the aid of Munster 
against the Gentiles, directing the men of 
Leinster in the campaign — a gallant war. 
Murtagh, king of Ailech or Tirconnell, smote 
the Danes at Carlingford and Louth in 926, 
a year of great danger, and so came victorious 
to the assembly at Telltown. Again, in 933, 
he defeated the "foreigners" in the north, 
and they left two hundred and forty heads, 
and all their wealth of spoils. In 941 he won 
his famous name, "Murtagh of the Leather 
Cloaks," from the first midwinter campaign 
ever known in Ireland, "the hosting of the 
frost," when he led his army from Donegal, 
under shelter of leather cloaks, over lakes and 
rivers frozen by the mighty frost, round the 
entire circuit of Ireland. Some ten years 
later, Cellachan, king of Cashel, took up the 
fight; with his linen-coated soldiers against 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 67 

the mail-clad foreigners, he swept the whole 
of Munster, capturing Limerick, Cork, Cashel 
and Waterford, and joining their Danish 
armies to his own troops; till he closed his 
campaign by calling out the Munster fleet 
from Kinsale to Galway bay, six or seven 
score of them, to meet the Danish ships at 
Dundalk. The Norsemen used armour, and 
rough chains of blue iron to grapple the ene- 
mies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with their 
"strong enclosures of linen cloth," and tough 
ropes of hemp to fling over the enemies' prows, 
came off victorious. According to the saga 
of his triumph, Cellachan called the whole 
of Ireland to share in the struggle for Irish 
freedom, and a fleet from Ailech carried off 
plunder and booty from the Hebrides. He 
was followed by Brian Boru. "Ill luck was 
it for the Danes when Brian was born," says 
the old saga, "when he inflicted not evil on 
the foreigners in the day time he did it in the 
next night." From beyond the Shannon he 
led a fierce guerrilla war. Left with but 
fifteen followers alive, sleeping on "hard 
knotty wet roots," he still refused to yield. 
"It is not hereditary to us," he said, "to 



68 IRISH NATIONALITY 

submit." He became king of Munster in 974, 
drove out the Danish king from Dubhn in 998, 
and ruled at last in 1000 as Ardri of Ireland, 
an old man of sixty or seventy years. In 1005 
he called out all the fleets of the Norsemen 
of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and of the 
men of Munster, and of almost all of the 
men of Erin, such of them as were fit to 
go to sea, and they levied tribute from Sax- 
ons and Britons as far as the Clyde and 
Argyle. 

A greater struggle still lay before the Irish. 
Powerful kings of Denmark, in the glory of 
success, began to think of their imperial 
destiny; and, to round off their states, pro- 
posed to create a Scandinavian empire from 
the Slavic shores of the Baltic across Den- 
mark, Norway, England and Ireland, to the 
rim of the Atlantic, with London as the 
capital. King Sweyn Forkbeard, conqueror 
of all England, was acknowledged in 1013 its 
king. But the imperial plan was not yet 
complete. A free Irish nation of men who 
lived, as they said, "on the ridge of the 
world" — a land of unconquered peoples of 
the open plains and the mountains and the 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 69 

sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a 
ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic 
commerce. King Cnut sent out his men for 
the last conquest. A vast host gathered in 
Dublin bay "from all the west of Europe," 
from Norway, the Baltic islands, the Orkneys, 
Iceland, for the landing at Clontarf. From 
sunrise to sunset the battle raged, the hair of 
the warriors flying in the wind as thick as the 
sheaves floating in a field of oats. The Scan- 
dinavian scheme of a northern empire was 
shattered on that day, when with the evening 
floodtide the remnant of the broken Danish 
host put to sea. Brian Boru, his son, and his 
grandson lay dead. But for a hundred and 
fifty years to come Ireland kept its independ- 
ence. England was once again, as in the time 
of the Roman dominion, made part of a con- 
tinental empire. Ireland, as in the days of 
Rome, still lay outside the new imperial 
system. 

At the end, therefore, of two hundred years 
of war, the Irish emerged with their national 
life unbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on 
side by side with Danish kingdoms; in spite 
of the strength of the Danish forces, the con- 



70 IRISH NATIONALITY 

slant irruptions of new Danes, and the busi- 
ness capacity of these fighters and traffickers, 
it was the Irish who were steadily coming 
again to the top. Through all perils they 
had kept their old order. The high-kings had 
ruled without a break, and, except in a few 
years of special calamity, had held the 
national assemblies of the country at Tell- 
town, not far from Tara. The tribesmen of 
the sub-kingdoms, if their ancient place of 
assembly had been turned into a Danish fort, 
held their meeting in a hidden marsh or 
wood. Thus when Cashel was held by the 
Norsemen, the assembly met on a mound 
that rose in the marshy glen now called 
Glan worth. There Cellachan, the rightful 
heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded 
that the nobles should remember justice, 
while his mother declared his title and recited 
a poem. And when the champions of Mun- 
ster heard these great words and the speech 
of the woman, the tribes arose right readily 
to make Cellachan king. They set up his 
shout of king, and gave thanks to the true 
magnificent God for having found him. The 
nobles then came to Cellachan and put 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 71 

their hands in his hand, and placed the royal 
diadem round his head, and their spirits were 
raised at the grand sight of him. 

Throughout the wars, too, the tribes had 
not lost the tradition of learning. King Ml- 
fred has recorded the state of England after 
the Danish wars; he could not bethink him 
of a single one south of the Thames who 
could understand his ritual in English, or 
translate aught out of Latin, and he could 
hear of very few north of the Thames to the 
Humber, and beyond the Humber scarce any, 
"so clean was learning decayed among the 
English folk." But the Irish had never 
ceased to carry on schools, and train men of 
distinguished learning. Clonmacnois on the 
Shannon, for example, preserved a truly 
Irish culture, and between its sackings trained 
great scholars whose fame could reach to 
King iElfred in Wessex, and to Charles 
the Great in Aachen. The Irish clergy still 
remained unequalled in culture, even in Italy. 
One of them in 868 was the most learned of 
the Latinists of all Europe. Another, Cor- 
mac, king and bishop (f 905), was skilled in 
Old-Irish literature, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, 



72 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Welsh, Anglo-Saxon and Norse — he might 
be compared with that other great Irishman 
of his time, John Scotus, whom Charles the 
Bald had made head of his school. Irish 
teachers had a higher skill than any others in 
Europe in astronomy, geography and phil- 
osophy. Side by side with monastic schools 
the lay schools had continued without a 
break. By 900 the lawyers had produced at 
least eighteen law-books whose names are 
known, and a glossary. A lay scholar, prob- 
ably of the ninth century, compiled the 
instructions of a king to his son — "Learning 
every art, knowledge of every language, skill 
in variegated work, pleading with established 
maxims" — these are the sciences he recom- 
mends. The Triads, compiled about the 
same time, count among the ornaments of 
wisdom, " abundance of knowledge, a number 
of precedents." Irish poets, men and women, 
were the first in Europe to sing of Nature — 
of summer and winter, of the cuckoo with 
the grey mantle, the blackbird's lay, the red 
bracken and the long hair of the heather, the 
talk of the rushes, the green-barked yew-tree 
which supports the sky, the large green of an 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 73 

oak fronting the storm. They sang of the 
Creation and the Crucifixion, when "dear 
God's elements were afraid"; and of pil- 
grimage to Rome — "the King whom thou 
seekest here, unless thou bring Him with 
thee thou dost not find"; of the hermit's 
"shining candles above the pure white 
scriptures . . . and I to be sitting for a 
while praying God in every place"; of the 
great fidelities of love — "the flagstone upon 
which he was wont to pray, she was upon it 
until she died. Her soul went to heaven. 
And that flagstone was put over her face." 
They chanted the terror of the time, the fierce 
riders of the sea in death-conflict with the 
mounting waves: "Bitter is the conflict with 
the tremendous tempest" — "Bitter is the 
wind to-night. It tosses the ocean's white 
hair; I do not fear the fierce warriors of 
Norway coursing on the Irish sea to-night." 
And in their own war of deliverance they 
sang of Finn and his Fiana on the battle- 
field, heroes of the Irish race. 

Even the craftsmen's schools were still 
gathered in their raths, preserving from 
century to century the forms and rules of 



74 IRISH NATIONALITY 

their art; soon after the battle of Clontarf we 
read of "the chief artificer of Ireland." The 
perfection of their art in enamel and gold 
work has been the wonder of the old and of 
the modern world. Many influences liad 
come in — Oriental, Byzantine, Scandina- 
vian, French — and the Irish took and used 
them all, but their art still remained Gaelic, 
of their native soil. No jeweller's work was 
ever more perfect than the Ardagh chalice of 
the ninth or tenth century, of pure Celtic art 
with no trace of Danish influence. The 
metal-workers of Munster must have been 
famous, from the title of "king Cellachan of 
the lovely cups"; and the golden case that 
enclosed the Gospel of Columcille in 1000 
was for its splendour "the chief relic from 
the western world." The stone-workers, too, 
carried on their art. There were schools of 
carvers eminent for skill, such as that of 
Holy Island on Lough Derg. One of the 
churches of Clonmacnois may date from the 
ninth century, five others from the tenth; 
finely sculptured gravestones commemorated 
saints and scholars; and the high-cross, a 
monolith ten feet high set up as a memorial 



SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 75 

to king Flann about 914, was carved by an 
Irish artist who was one of the greatest 
sculptors of northern Europe. 

The temper of the people was shown in 
their hero-king Brian Boru, warrior and 
scholar. His government was with patience, 
mercy and justice. "King Brian thrice for- 
gave all his outlaws the same fault," says a 
Scandinavian saga, *^but if they misbehaved 
themselves oftener, then he let them be 
judged by the law; and from this one may 
mark what a king he must have been." "He 
sent professors and masters to teach wisdom 
and knowledge, and to buy books beyond 
the sea and the great ocean, because the 
writings and books in every church and 
sanctuary had been destroyed by the plun- 
derers; and Brian himself gave the price of 
learning and the price of books to every one 
separately who went on this service. Many 
churches were built and repaired by him, 
bridges and roads were made, the fortresses 
of Munster were strengthened." 

Such was the astonishing vitality of learn- 
ing and art among the Irish. By their social 
system the intellectual treasures of the race 



76 IRISH NATIONALITY 

had been distributed among the whole people, 
and committed to their care. And the Irish 
tribes had proved worthy guardians of the 
national faith. They had known how to 
profit by the material skill and knowledge of 
the Danes. Irishmen were willing to absorb 
the foreigners, to marry with them, and 
even at times to share their wars. They 
learned from them to build ships, organise 
naval forces, advance in trade, and live in 
towns; they used the northern words for 
the parts of a ship, and the streets of a town. 
In outward and material civilisation they ac- 
cepted the latest Scandinavian methods, just 
as in our days the Japanese accepted the 
latest Western inventions. But in what 
the Germans call culture — in the ordering 
of society and law, of life and thought, the 
Irish never abandoned their national loyalty. 
During two centuries of Danish invasions 
and occupations the Gaelic civilisation had 
not given way an inch to the strangers. 



CHAPTER V 

THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 

1014-1169 

After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the 
Irish had a hundred and fifty years of com- 
parative quiet. "A lively, stirring, ancient 
and victorious people," they turned to repair 
their hurts and to build up their national life. 

Throughout the Danish wars there had 
been a growth of industry and riches. No 
people ever made a successful national rally 
unless they were on the rising wave of pros- 
perity. It is not misery and degradation 
that bring success. Already Ireland was 
known in France as "that very wealthy 
country in which there were twelve cities, 
and wide bishoprics, and a king, and that 
had its own language, and Latin letters." 

But the position of the Gaels was no longer 
what it had been before the invasions. The 

"Foreigners" called constantly for armed 

77 



78 IRISH NATIONALITY 

help from their people without, and by politi- 
cal alliances and combinations fostered war 
among the Irish states themselves. Nearly 
a hundred years after Clontarf king Magnus 
of Norway (11 03) led the greatest army that 
ever marched conquering over Ireland. In 
a dark fen the young giant flamed out a mark 
for all, with his shining helmet, his golden 
hair falling long over his red silken coat, his 
red shield, and laid thereon a golden lion. 
There he fell by an Irish axe. The glory and 
terror of "Magnus of the swift ships," "Mag- 
nus of the terrible battles," was sung in 
Ireland for half-a-dozen centuries after that 
last flaring-up of ancient fires. 

The national life, moreover, was now 
threatened by the settlement of an alien race, 
' strangers to the Irish tradition, strangers to 
the Irish idea of a state, and to their feeling 
of a church. The sea-kings had created in 
Dublin an open gateway into Ireland, a 
gateway like Quebec in Canada, that com- 
manded the country and that the country 
could never again close from within. They 
had filled the city with Scandinavian settlers 
from the English and Welsh coasts — pioneers 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 79 

of English invasion. A wealthy and compact 
community living on the seaboard, trading 
with all Enrope, inclined to the views of their 
business clients in England and the Empire, 
their influence doubled the strength of the 
European pressure on Ireland as against the 
Gaelic civilisation. 

To the division of peoples within the Irish 
state the Danes added also the first division 
in the Irish church. Olaf Cuaran, overlord 
of northmen of Dublin and York, had been 
baptized (943) in Northumberland by the 
archbishop of Canterbury, in presence of the 
English king. He formed the first converted 
Danes into a part of the English Church, so 
that their bishops were sent to be ordained 
at Canterbury. Since the Irish in 603 had 
refused to deal with an archbishop of the 
English, this was the first foothold Canter- 
bury had got in Ireland. It was the rending 
in two of the Irish tradition, the degrading 
of the primacy of Armagh, the admission of 
a foreign power, and the triumph of the 
English over the Gaelic church. 

In church and state, therefore, the Danes 
had brought the first anti-national element 



80 IRISH NATIONALITY 

into Irish life. The change is marked by a 
change of name. The Danes coined the 
name "/re-land," a form of Eriu suited to 
their own speech; the people they called "Ir- 
ish," leaving the name of "Scots" only to the 
Gaels who had crossed the sea into Alban. 
Their trading ships carried the words far and 
wide, and the old name of Eriu only remained 
in th*ie speech of the Gaels themselves. 

Clontarf, too, had marked ominously the 
passing of an old age, the beginning of a new. 
Already the peoples round the North Sea — 
Normans, Germans, English — were sending 
out traders to take the place of the Scandi- 
navians; and the peoples of the south — 
Italians and Gauls — were resuming their 
ancient commerce. We may see the advent 
of the new men in the names of adventurers 
that landed with the Danes on that low shore 
at Clontarf — the first great drops of the 
storm — lords from Normandy, a Frenchman 
from Gaul, and somewhere about that time 
Walter the Englishman, a leader of merce- 
naries from England. In such names we see 
the heralds of the coming change. 

The Irish were therefore face to face with 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 81 

questions of a new order — how to fuse two 
wholly different peoples into one community; 
how to make a united church within a united 
nation; and how to use foreign influences 
pouring in on all sides so as to enrich without 
destroying the national life. Here was the 
work of the next hundred and fifty years. 
Such problems have been solved in other lands 
by powerful kings at the heads of armies; in 
Ireland it was the work of the whole com- 
munity of tribes. It is in this effort that we 
see the immense vitality of the Gaelic system 
the power of its tradition, and the spirit of 
its people. 

After Brian's death two learned men were 
set over the government of Ireland; a lay- 
man, the Chief Poet, and a devout man, the 
Anchorite of all Ireland. "The land was 
governed like a free state and not like a mon- 
archy by them." The victory of Clontarf was 
celebrated by a renascence of learning. Eye- 
witnesses of that great battle, poets and his- 
torians, wrote the chronicle of the Danish 
wars from first to last, and sang the glories 
of Cellachan and of Brian Boru in the great- 
ness of his life and the majesty of his death. A 



82 IRISH NATIONALITY 

scholar put into Irish from Latin the "Tale 
of Troy," where the exploits and battle rage 
of the ancient heroes matched the martial 
ardour of Irish champions, and the same words 
are used for the fights and armour and ships 
of the Trojan as of the Danish wars. Another 
translated from Latin a history of the Britons, 
the neighbouring Celtic races across the Chan- 
nel. In schools three or four hundred poetic 
metres were taught. The glories of ancient 
Erin were revived. Poets wrote of Usnech, 
of Tara, of Ailech, of the O'Neills on Lough 
Swilly in the far north, of Brian Boru's palace 
Kincora on the Shannon, of Rath Cruachan 
of Connacht. Tales of heroes, triumphs of 
ancient kings, were written in the form in 
which we now know them, genealogies of the 
tribes and old hymns of Irish saints. Clerics 
and laymen rivalled one another in zeal. In 
kings' courts, in monasteries, in schools, an- 
nals of Ireland from the earliest to the latest 
time were composed. Men laboured to sat- 
isfy the desire of the Irish to possess a com- 
plete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all 
antiquity. The most famous among the many 
writers, one of the most learned men in all 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 83 

Europe in wisdom, literature, history, poetry, 
and science, was Flann the layman, teacher of 
the school of Monasterboice, who died in 1056 
— "slow the bright eyes of his fine head," ran 
the old song. He made for his pupils syn- 
chronisms of the kings of Asia and of Roman 
emperors with Irish kings, and of the Irish 
high-kings and provincial chiefs and kings of 
Scotland. Writings of that time which have 
escaped destruction, such as the Book of Lein- 
ster, remain the most important relics of 
Celtic literature in the world. 

There was already the beginning of a uni- 
versity in the ancient school of Armagh 
lying on the famous hill where for long ages 
the royal tombs of the O 'Neills had been pre- 
served. "The strong burh of Tara has died," 
they said, "while Armagh lives filled with 
learned champions." It now rose to a great 
position. With its three thousand scholars, 
famous for its teachers, under its high-ollave 
Gorman who spent twenty-one years of study, 
from 1133 to 1154, in England and France, it 
became in fact the national university for the 
Irish race in Ireland and Scotland. It was 
appointed that every lector in any church in 



84 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Ireland must take there a degree; and in 1169 
the high-king Ruaidhri O 'Conor gave the 
first annual grant to maintain a professor at 
Armagh "for all the Irish and the Scots." 

A succession of great bishops of Armagh 
laboured to bring about also the organisation 
of a national church under the government of 
Armagh. From 1068 they began to make 
visitations of the whole country, and take 
tribute and offerings in sign of the Armagh 
leadership. They journeyed in the old Irish 
fashion on foot, one of them followed by a 
cow on whose milk he lived, all poor, without 
servants, without money, wandering among 
hills and remote hamlets, stopping men on the 
roadside to talk, praying for them all night 
by the force only of their piety and the fervour 
of their spirit drawing all the communities 
under obedience to the see of Patrick, the 
national saint. In a series of synods from 
1100 to 1157 a fixed number of bishops' sees 
was marked out, and four archbishoprics 
representing the four provinces. The Danish 
sees, moreover, were brought into this union, 
and made part of the Irish organisation. 
Thus the power of Canterbury in Ireland was 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 85 

ended, and a national church set up of Irish 
and Danes. Dublin, the old Scandinavian 
kingdom, whose prelates for over a hundred 
years had been consecrated in England (1036- 
1161), was the last to hold out against the 
union of churches, till this strife was healed by 
St. Lorcan ua Tuathail, the first Irish bishop 
consecrated in Dublin. He carried to that 
battleground of the peoples all the charity, 
piety, and asceticism of the Irish saint: feed- 
ing the poor daily, never himself tasting meat, 
rising at midnight to pray till dawn, and ever 
before he slept going out into the graveyard 
to pray there for the dead; from time to time 
withdrawing among the Wicklow hills to St. 
Kevin's Cave at Glendalough, a hole in the 
cliff overhanging the dark lake swept with 
storm from the mountain-pass, where twice a 
week bread and water were brought him by a 
boat and a ladder up the rock. His life was 
spent in the effort for national peace and 
union, nor had Ireland a truer patriot or 
wiser statesman. 

Kings and chiefs sat with the clergy in the 
Irish synods, and in the state too there were 
signs of a true union of the peoples. The 



86 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Danes, gradually absorbed into the Irish pop- 
ulation, lost the sense of separate nationality. 
The growing union of the peoples was seen in 
the increasing power of the Ardri. Brian's 
line maintained at Cachel the title of "kings 
of Ireland," strengthening their house with 
Danish marriages; they led Danish forces and 
were elected kings of the Danes in Dublin. 
But in the twelfth century it was the Con- 
nacht kings who came to the front, the same 
race that a thousand years before had spread 
their power across the Shannon to Usnech and 
to Tara. Turlough O'Conor (1118-1156) was 
known to Henry I of England as "king of 
Ireland"; on a metal cross made for him he 
is styled "king of Erin," and a missal of his 
time (1150) contains the only prayer yet 
known for "the king of the Irish and his 
army" — the sign, as we may see, of foreign 
influences on the Irish mind. His son, Ruai- 
dhri or Rory, was proclaimed (1166) Ardri in 
Dublin with greater pomp than any king be- 
fore him, and held at Athboy in Meath an 
assembly of the "men of Ireland," arch- 
bishops and clergy, princes and nobles, eigh- 
teen thousand horsemen from the tribes and 



THE FIRST miSH REVIVAL 87 

provinces, and a thousand Danes from Dub- 
lin — there laws were made for the honour of 
churches and clergy, the restoring of prey un- 
justly taken, and the control of tribes and 
territories, so that a woman might traverse 
the land in safety; and the vast gathering 
broke up "in peace and amity, without battle 
or controversy, or any one complaining of an- 
other at that meeting." It is said that Rory 
O' Conor's procession when he held the last of 
the national festivals at Telltown was several 
miles in length. 

The whole of Ireland is covered with the 
traces of this great national revival. We may 
still see on islands, along river-valleys, in 
lonely fields, innumerable ruins of churches 
built of stone chiselled as finely as man's hand 
can cut it; and of the lofty round towers and 
sculptured high crosses that were multiplied 
over the land after the day of Clontarf . The 
number of the churches has not been counted. 
It must be astonishing. At first they were 
built in the "Romanesque" style brought 
from the continent, with plain round arches, 
as Brian Boru made them about a.d. 1000; 
presently chancels were added, and doors and 



88 IRISH NATIONALITY 

windows and arches richly carved. These 
churches were still small, intimate, suited to 
the worship of the tribal communities; as 
time went on they were larger and more richly 
decorated, but always marked with the re- 
membrance of Irish tradition and ornament, 
and signed by Irish masons on the stones. 
There was a wealth of metal work of great 
splendour, decorated with freedom and bold- 
ness of design, with inlaid work and filigree, 
and settings of stones and enamels and crys- 
tal; as we may see in book-shrines, in the 
crosiers of Lismore and Cachel and Clonmac- 
nois and many others, in the matchless pro- 
cessional cross of Cong, in the great shrine of 
St. Manchan with twenty-four figures highly 
raised on each side in a variety of postures 
remarkable for the time. It was covered with 
an embroidery of gold in as good style, say 
the Annals, as a reliquary was ever covered 
in Ireland. Irish skill was known abroad. A 
French hero of romance wore a fine belt of 
Irish leather-work, and a knight of Bavaria 
had from Ireland ribbon of gold-lace em- 
broidered with animals in red gold. 

The vigour of Irish life overflowed, indeed. 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 89 

the bounds of the country. Cloth from 
Ireland was already sold in England and it 
was soon to spread over ail Europe. It is 
probable that export of corn and provisions 
had already begun, and of timber, besides 
hides and wool. And the frequent mention 
of costly gifts and tributes, and of surprisingly 
large sums of gold and silver show a country 
of steadily expanding wealth. From the time 
of Brian Boru learned men poured over the 
continent. Pilgrims journeyed to Compos- 
tella, to Rome, or through Greece to Jordan 
and Jerusalem — composing poems on the 
way, making discourses in Latin, showing 
their fine art of writing. John, bishop of 
Mecklenburg, preached to the Vandals be- 
tween the Elbe and the Vistula; Marianus 
"the Scot" on his pilgrimage to Rome stopped 
at Regensburg on the Danube, and founded 
there a monastery of north Irishmen in 1068, 
to which was soon added a second house for 
south Irishmen. Out of these grew the 
twelve Irish convents of Germany and Aus- 
tria. An Irish abbot was head of a monastery 
in Bulgaria. From time to time the Irish 
came home to collect money for their f ounda- 



90 IRISH NATIONALITY 

tions and went back laden with gold from the 
kings at home. Pope Adrian IV (1154) re- 
membered with esteem the Irish professor 
under whom he had studied in Paris Univer- 
sity. Irishmen were chaplains of the emperor 
Conrad III (tll52) and of his successor 
Frederick Barbarossa. Strangers "moved by 
the love of study" still set out "in imitation of 
their ancestors to visit the land of the Irish 
so wonderfully celebrated for its learning." 

While the spirit of Ireland manifested itself 
in the shaping of a national university, and of 
a national church, in the revival of the glories 
of the Ardri, and in vigour of art and learn- 
ing, there was an outburst too among the 
common folk of jubilant patriotism. We can 
hear the passionate voice of the people in the 
songs and legends, the prophecies of the en- 
during life of Irishmen on Irish land, the 
popular tales that began at this time to run 
from mouth to mouth. They took to them- 
selves two heroes to be centres of the national 
hope — Finn the champion, leader of the 
"Fiana," the war-bands of old time; and 
Patrick the saint. A multitude of tales sud- 
denly sprang up of the adventures of Finn — 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 91 

the warrior worthy of a king, the son of wis- 
dom, the mighty hunter of every mountain 
and forest in Ireland, whose death no minstrel 
cared to sing. Every poet was expected to 
recite the fame in life of Finn and his com- 
panions. Pedigrees were invented to link him 
with every great house in Ireland, for their 
greater glory and authority. Side by side with 
Finn the people set St. Patrick — keeper of 
Ireland against all strangers, guardian of 
their nation and tradition. It was Patrick, 
they told, who by invincible prayer and fast- 
ing at last compelled Heaven to grant that 
outlanders should not for ever inhabit Erin; 
"that the Saxons should not dwell in Ireland, 
by consent or perforce, so long as I abide in 
heaven:" "Thou shalt have this," said the 
out wearied angel. "Around thee," was the 
triumphant Irish hope, "on the Day of 
Judgment the men of Erin shall come to 
judgment"; for after the twelve thrones of 
the apostles were set in Judsea to judge the 
tribes of Israel, Patrick himself should at the 
end arise and call Jthe^jeople of Ireland to be 
judged by hirfi on a mountain in their own 
land. 



92 IRISH NATIONALITY 

As in the old Gaelic tradition, so now the 
people fused in a single emotion the nation 
and the church. They brought from dusky 
woods the last gaunt relics of Finn's company, 
sad and dispirited at the falling of the evening 
clouds, and set them face to face with Patrick 
as he chanted mass on one of their old raths 
— men twice as tall as the modern folk, with 
their huge wolf-dogs, men "who were not of 
our epoch or of one time with the clergy." 
When Patrick hesitated to hear their pagan 
memories of Ireland and its graves, of its men 
who died for honour, of its war and hunting, 
its silver bridles and cups of yellow gold, its 
music and great f eastings, lest such recreation 
of spirit and mind should be to him a destruc- 
tion of devotion and dereliction of prayer, 
angels were sent to direct him to give ear to 
the ancient stories of Ireland, and write them 
down for the joy of companies and nobles of 
the latter time. "Victory and blessing wait 
on thee, Caeilte," said Patrick, thus called to 
the national service; "for the future thy 
stories and thyself are dear to me"; "grand 
lore and knowledge is this thou hast uttered 
to us." "Thou too, Patrick, hast taught us 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 93 

good things," the warriors responded with 
courteous dignity. So at all the holy places 
of Ireland, the pillar-stone of ancient Usnech, 
the ruined mounds of Tara, great Rath-Crua- 
chan of Connacht, the graves of mighty 
champions. Pagan hero and Christian saint 
sat together to make interchange of history 
and religion, the teaching of the past and the 
promise of the future. St. Patrick gave his 
blessing to minstrels and story-tellers and 
to all craftsmen of Ireland — " and to them that 
profess it be it all happiness." He mounted 
to the high glen to see the Fiana raise their 
warning signal of heroic chase and hunting. 
He saw the heavy tears of the last of the 
heroes till his very breast, his chest was wet. 
He laid in his bosom the head of the pagan 
hunter and warrior: "By me to thee," said 
Patrick, "and whatsoever be the place in 
which God shall lay hand on thee. Heaven 
is assigned." "For thy sake," said the 
saint, "be thy lord Finn mac Cumhall taken 
out of torment, if it be good in the sight of 
God." 

In no other country did such a fate befall 
a missionary coming from strangers — to be 



94 IRISH NATIONALITY 

taken and clothed upon with the national 
passion of a people, shaped after the pattern 
of their spirit, made the keeper of the nation's 
soul, the guardian of its whole tradition. 
Such legends show how enthusiasm for the 
common country ran through every hamlet 
in the land, and touched the poorest as it did 
the most learned. They show that the social 
order in Ireland after the Danish settlements 
was the triumph of an Irish and not a Danish 
civilisation. The national life of the Irish, 
free, democratic, embracing every emotion 
of the whole people, gentle or simple, was 
powerful enough to gather into it the strong 
and freedom-loving rovers of the sea. 

On all sides, therefore, we see the growth of 
a people compacted of Irish and Danes, 
bound together under the old Irish law and 
social order, with Dublin as a centre of the 
united races, Armagh a national university, 
a single and independent church under an 
Irish primate of Armagh and an Irish arch- 
bishop of Dublin, a high-king calling the 
people together in a succession of national 
assemblies for the common good of the 
country. The new union of Ireland was being 



THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 95 

slowly worked out by her political council- 
lors, her great ecclesiastics, her scholars and 
philosophers, and by the faith of the common 
people in the glory of their national inherit- 
ance. "The bodies and minds of the people 
were endued with extraordinary abihties of 
nature," so that art, learning and commerce 
prospered in their hands. On this fair hope 
of rising civilisation there fell a new and 
tremendous trial. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NORMAN INVASION 

1169-1520 

After the fall of the Danes the Normans, 
conquerors of England, entered on the domin- 
ion of the sea — "citizens of the world," they 
carried their arms and their cunning from 
the Tweed to the Mediterranean, from the 
Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of con- 
quest was in the air. Every landless man 
was looking to make his fortune. Every 
baron desired, like his viking forefathers, a 
land where he could live out of reach of the 
king's long arm. They had marked out 
Ireland as their natural prey — "a land very 
rich in plunder, and famed for the good 
temperature of the air, the fruitfulness of 
the soil, the pleasant and commodious seats 
for habitation, and safe and large ports and 
havens lying open for traffic." Norman 



THE NORMAN INVASION 97 

barons were araong the enemy at the battle 
of Clontarf in 1014. The same year that 
Ireland saw the last of the Scandmavian 
sea kings (1103) she saw the first of the 
Norman invaders prying out the country 
for a kingdom. William Rufus (1087-1100) 
had fetched from Ireland great oaks to roof 
his Hall at Westminster, and planned the 
conquest of an island so desirable. A greater 
empire-maker, Henry II, lord of a vast sea- 
coast from the Forth to the Pyrenees, hold- 
ing both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland 
to round off his dominions and give him 
command of the traffic from his English ports 
across the Irish Sea, from his ports of the 
Loire and the Garonne over the Gaulish sea. 
The trade was well worth the venture. 

Norman and French barons, with Welsh fol- 
lowers, and Flemings from Pembroke, led the 
invasion that began in 1169. They were men 
trained to war, with armour and weapons un- 
known to the Irish. But they owed no small 
part of their military successes in Ireland to a 
policy of craft. If the Irish fought hard to 
defend the lands they held in civil tenure, 
the churches had no great strength, and the 



98 IRISH NATIONALITY 

seizing of a churcli estate led to no immediate 
rising out of the country. The settled plan 
of the Normans, therefore, was to descend on 
defenceless church lands, and turn them 
into Norman strongholds; in reply to com- 
plaints, they pleaded that the churches were 
used by the hostile Irish as storing places 
for their goods. Their occupation gave the 
Normans a great military advantage, for 
once the churches were fortified and gar- 
risoned with Norman skill the reduction of 
the surrounding country became much easier. 
The Irish during this period sometimes 
plundered church lands, but did not occupy, 
annex, or fortify them. The invaders mean- 
while spread over the country. French and 
Welsh and Flemings have left their mark 
in every part of Ireland, by Christian names, 
by names of places and families, and by loan- 
words taken into Irish from the French. 
The English who came over went chiefly to 
the towns, many of them to Dublin through 
the Bristol trade. Henry II himself crossed 
in 1171 with a great fleet and army to over- 
awe his too-independent barons as well as 
the Irish, and from the wooden palace set 



THE NORMAN INVASION 99 

up for him in Dublin demanded a general 
oath of allegiance. The Normans took the 
oath, with some churchmen and half-a-dozen 
Irish chiefs. 

In Henry's view this oath was a confession 
that the Irish knew themselves conquered; 
and that the chief renounced the tribal 
system, and handed over the land to the king, 
•so that he as supreme lord of all the soil 
could allot it to his barons, and demand 
in return the feudal services common in 
Normandy or in England. No Irish chief, 
however, could have even understood these 
ideas. He knew nothing of the feudal system, 
nor of a landlord in the English sense. He 
had no power to hand the land of the tribe 
over to any one. He could admit no "con- 
quest," for the seizing of a few towns and 
forts could not carry the subjection of all the 
independent chief doms. Whatever Henry's 
theory might be, the taking of Dublin was 
not the taking of an Irish capital: the people 
had seen its founding as the centre of a 
foreign kingdom, and their own free life had 
continued as of old. Henry's presence there 
gave him no lordship: and the independent 



100 IRISH NATIONALITY 

temper of the Irish people was not likely, 
after their Danish experience, to be cowed 
by two years of war. Some cunning explana- 
tion of the oath was given to the Irish chiefs 
by the subtle Angevin king and his crafty 
Norman counsellors — that war was to cease, 
that they were to rule as fully and freely 
as before, and in recognition of the peace 
to give to Henry a formal tribute which im- 
plied no dominion. 

The false display at Dublin was a deception 
both to the king and to the Irish. The 
empty words on either side did not check 
for a month the lust of conquest nor the 
passion of defence. 

One royal object, however, was made good. 
The oath, claimed under false pretences, 
yielded under misunderstanding, impossible 
of fulfilment, was used to confer on the king 
a technical legal right to Ireland; this legal 
fiction became the basis of the royal claims, 
and the justification of every later act of 
violence. 

Another fraud was added by the proclama- 
tion of papal bulls, which according to modern 
research seem to have been mere forgeries. 



THE NORMAN INVASION 101 

They gave the lordship of the country to 
Henry, and were readily accepted by the 
invaders and their successors. But they were 
held of no account among Irish annalists 
and writers, who make no mention of the 
bulls during the next three hundred years. 

Thus the grounds of the English title to 
Ireland were laid down, and it only remained 
to make good by the sword the fictions of 
law and the falsehoods of forgers. According 
to these Ireland had been by the act of the 
natives and by the will of God conferred on 
a higher race. Kings carved out estates for 
their nobles. The nobles had to conquer 
the territories granted them. Each con- 
quered tract was to be made into a little 
England, enclosed within itself, and sharply 
fenced off from the supposed sea of savagery 
around it. There was to be no trade with the 
Irish, no intercourse, no relationship, no use 
of their dress, speech, or laws, no dealings 
save those of conquest and slaughter. The 
colonists were to form an English parliament 
to enact English law. A lieutenant-governor, 
or his deputy, was set in Dublin Castle to 
superintend the conquest and the adminis- 



102 IRISH NATIONALITY 

tration. The fighting garrison was rein- 
forced by the planting of a mihtant church 
— bishops and clergy of foreign blood, stout 
men of war, ready to aid by prayers, excom- 
munications, and the sword. A bishop of 
Waterford being once sent by the Lord 
Justice to account to Edward I for a battle 
of the Irish in which the king of Connacht 
and two thousand of his men lay dead, ex- 
plained that "in policy he thought it ex- 
pedient to wink at one knave cutting off 
another, and that would save the king's 
coffers and purchase peace to the land"; 
whereat the king smiled and bade him return 
to Ireland. 

The Irish were now therefore aliens in 
their own country. Officially they did not 
exist. Their land had been parted out by 
kings among their barons "till in title they 
were owners and lords of all, so as nothing 
was left to be granted to the natives." Dur- 
ing centuries of English occupation not a 
single law was enacted for their relief or 
benefit. They were refused the protection 
of English law, shut out from the king's 
courts and from the king's peace. The people 



THE NORMAN INVASION 103 

who had carried the peaceful mission of a 
spiritual religion over England and Europe 
now saw that other mission planted among 
themselves — a political church bearing the 
sword of the conqueror, and dealing out 
anathemas and death in the service of a state 
which rewarded it with temporal wealth and 
dominion. 

The English attack was thus wholly differ- 
ent from that of the Danes: it was guided 
by a fixed purpose, and directed by kings 
who had a more absolute power, a more 
compact body of soldiers, and a better filled 
treasury than any other rulers in Europe. 
Dublin, no mere centre now of roving sea- 
kings, was turned into an impregnable for- 
tress, fed from the sea, and held by a garrison 
which was supported by the whole strength 
of England — a fortress unconquerable by 
any power within Ireland — a passage through 
which the strangers could enter at their ease. 
The settlers were no longer left to lapse as 
isolated groups into Irish life, but were linked 
together as a compact garrison under the 
Castle government. The vigilance of West- 
minster never ceased, nor the supply of its 



104 IRISH NATIONALITY 

treasure, its favoured colonists, and its ablest 
generals. From Henry II to Elizabeth, the 
aim of the English government was the same. 
The ground of Ireland was to be an immediate 
holding, "a royal inheritance," of the king. 
On an issue so sharp and definite no com- 
promise was possible. So long as the Irish 
claimed to hold a foot of their own land the 
war must continue. It lasted, in fact, for 
five hundred years, and at no moment was 
any peace possible to the Irish except by 
entire renunciation of their right to the actual 
soil of their country. If at times dealings 
were opened by the English with an Irish 
chief, or a heavy sum taken to allow him to 
stay on his land, this was no more than a 
temporary stratagem or a local expedient, 
and in no way affected the fixed intention 
to gain the ownership of the soil. 

Out of the first tumult and anarchy of war 
an Ireland emerged which was roughly divided 
between the two peoples. In Ulster, O'Neills 
and O'Donnells and other tribes remained, 
with only a fringe of Normans on the coast. 
O'Conors and other Irish clans divided Con- 
nacht, and absorbed into the Gaelic life 



THE NORMAN INVASION 105 

the incoming Norman de Burghs. The Anglo- 
Normans, on the other hand, estabHshed 
themselves powerfully in Munster and Lein- 
ster. But even here — side by side with the 
great lords of the invasion, earls of Ormond, 
and Desmond, and Kildare — there remained 
Irish kingdoms and the remnants of old chief- 
doms, unconquered, resolute and wealthy — 
such as the O'Briens in the west, MacCarthys 
and O'SuUivans in the south, O'Conors and 
O'Mores in the middle country, MacMur- 
roughs and O'Tooles in Leinster, and many 
more. 

It has been held that all later misfortunes 
would have been averted if the English 
without faltering had carried out a complete 
conquest, and ended the dispute once for all. 
English kings had, indeed, every temptation 
to this direct course. The wealth of the 
country lay spread before them. It was a 
land abounding in corn and cattle, in fish, 
in timber; its manufactures were famed 
over all Europe; gold-mines were reported; 
foreign merchants flocked to its ports, and 
bankers and money-lenders from the Rhine- 
land and Lucca, with speculators from 



106 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Provence, were carrying over foreign coin, 
settling in the towns, and taking land in 
the country. Sovereigns at Westminster — 
harassed with turbulent barons at home 
and wars abroad — looked to a conquered 
Ireland to supply money for their treasury, 
soldiers for their armies, provisions for their 
wars, and estates for their favourites. In 
haste to reap their full gains they demanded 
nothing better than a conquest rapid and 
complete. They certainly cannot be charged 
with dimness of intention, slackness in effort, 
or want of resource in dilemmas. It would 
be hard to imagine any method of domination 
which was not used — among the varied re- 
sources of the army, the church, the lawyers, 
the money-lenders, the schoolmasters, the 
Castle intriguers and the landlords. The 
official class in Dublin, recruited every few 
years with uncorrupted blood from England, 
urged on the war with the dogged persistence 
of their race. 

But the conquest of the Irish nation was 
not so simple as it had seemed to Anglo- 
Norman speculators. The proposal to take 
the land out of the hands of an Irish people 



THE NORMAN INVASION 107 

and give it to a foreign king, could only have 
been carried out by the slaughter of the entire 
population. No lesser effort could have 
turned a free tribal Ireland into a dependent 
feudal England. 

The English kings had made a further 
mistake. They proposed, like later kings of 
Spain in South America, to exploit Ireland 
for the benefit of the crown and the metropo- 
lis, not for the welfare of any class whatever 
of the inhabitants; the colonists were to be a 
mere garrison to conquer and hold the land 
for the king. But the Anglo-Norman ad- 
venturers had gone out to find profit for them- 
selves, not to collect Irish wealth for London, 
Their "loyalty" failed under that test. 
The kings, therefore, found themselves en- 
gaged in a double conflict, against the Irish 
and against their own colonists, and were 
every year more entangled in the diflSculties 
of a policy false from the outset. 

Yet another difficulty disclosed itself. 
Among the colonists a little experience 
destroyed the English theory of Irish "bar- 
barism." The invaders were drawn to their 
new home not only by its wealth but by its 



108 IRISH NATIONALITY 

beauty, the variety and gaiety of its social 
life, the intelligence of its inhabitants, and 
the attraction of its learning and art. Settlers, 
moreover, could neither live nor till the lands 
they had seized, nor trade in the seaports, 
nor find soldiers for their defence, without 
coming to terms with their Irish neighbours. 
To them the way of wealth lay not in slaugh- 
ter but in traffic, not in destroying riches but 
in sharing them. The colonists compromised 
with "the Irish enemy." They took to Irish 
dress and language; they recognised Irish 
land tenure, as alone suited to the country 
and people, one also that gave them peace 
with their farmers and cattle-drivers, and 
kept out of their estates the king's sheriffs 
and tax-gatherers; they levied troops from 
their tenants in the Irish manner; they em- 
ployed Irishmen in offices of trust; they paid 
neighbouring tribes for military service — 
such as to keep roads and passes open for 
their traders and messengers. "English born 
in Ireland," "degenerate Enghsh," were as 
much feared by the king as the "mere Irish." 
They were not counted "of English birth"; 
lands were resumed from them, office forbid- 



THE NORMAN INVASION 109 

den them. In every successive generation 
new men of pure English blood were to be sent 
over to serve the king's purpose and keep 
in check the Ireland-born. 

The Irish wars, therefore, became exceed- 
ingly confused — kings, barons, tribes, all 
entangled in interminable strife. Every chief, 
surrounded by dangers, was bound to turn his 
court into a place of arms thronged by men 
ready to drive back the next attack or start 
on the next foray. Whatever was the bur- 
den of military taxation no tribe dared to 
disarm any more than one of the European 
countries to-day. The Dublin officials, mean- 
while, eked out their military force by craft; 
they created and encouraged civil wars ; they 
called on the Danes who had become mingled 
with the Irish to come out from them and 
resume their Danish nationality, as the only 
means of being allowed protection of law and 
freedom to trade. To avert the dangers of 
friendship and peace between races in Ireland 
they became missionaries of disorder, apostles 
of contention. Civil wars within any country 
exhaust themselves and come to a natural 
end. But civil wars maintained by a foreign 



110 IRISH NATIONALITY 

power from without have no conclusion. 
If any strong leader arose, Anglo-Norman or 
Irish, the whole force of England was called 
in, and the ablest commanders fetched over 
from the French wars, great men of battle 
and plunder, to fling the province back into 
weakness and disorder. 

In England the feudal system had been 
brought to great perfection — a powerful 
king, a state organised for common action, 
with a great military force, a highly organ- 
ised treasury, a powerful nobility, and a 
dependent people. The Irish tribal system, 
on the other hand, rested on a people en- 
dowed with a wide freedom, guided by an 
ancient tradition, and themselves the guar- 
dians of their law and of their land. They had 
still to show what strength lay in their 
spiritual ideal of a nation's life to subdue the 
minds of their invaders, and to make a stand 
against their organised force. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 

1200-1520 

The first Irish revival after the Danish 
wars showed the strength of the ancient 
Gaehc eivihsation. The second victory which 
the genius of the people won over the minds 
of the new invaders was a more astonishing 
proof of the vitality of the Irish culture, the 
firm structure of their law, and the cohesion 
of the people. 

Henry II in 1171 had led an army for "the 

conquest " of Ireland. Three hundred years 

later, when Henry VII in 1487 turned his 

thoughts to Ireland he found no conquered 

land. An earthen ditch with a palisade on the 

top had been raised to protect all that was 

left of English Ireland, called the "Pale" from 

its encircling fence. Outside was a country 

of Irish language, dress, and customs. Thirty 

111 



11^ IRISH NATIONALITY 

miles west of Dublin was "by west of English 
law." Norman lords had married daughters 
of Irish chiefs all over the country, and made 
combinations and treaties with every province. 
Their children went to be fostered in kindly 
houses of the Irish. Into their own palisaded 
forts, lifted on great mounds of earth, with 
three-fold entrenchments, came Irish poets 
singing the traditions, the love-songs, the 
prayers and hymns of the Gaels. A Norman 
shrine of gold for St. Patrick's tooth shows 
how the Norman lord of Athenry had adopted 
the national saint. Many settlers changed 
their names to an Irish form, and taking up 
the clan system melted into the Irish popu- 
lation. Irish speech was so universal that a 
proclamation of Henry VIII in a Dublin 
parliament had to be translated into Irish 
by the earl of Ormond. 

Irish manners had entered also into the 
town houses of the merchants. Foreign 
traders welcomed "natives" to the seaports, 
employed them, bought their wares, took 
them into partnership, married with them, 
allowed them to plead Irish law in their courts 
— and not only that, but they themselves 



THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 113 

wore the forbidden Irish dress, talked Irish 
with the other townsfolk, and joined in their 
national festivities and ceremonies and songs. 
Almost to the very gates of Dublin, in the 
centre of what should have been pure English 
land, the merchants went riding Irish fashion, 
in Irish dress, and making merry with their 
forbidden Irish clients. 

This Irish revival has been attributed to a 
number of causes — to an invasion of Edward 
Bruce in 1315, to the "degeneracy" of the 
Normans, to the vice of the Irish, to the Wars 
of the Roses, to the want of energy of Dub- 
lin Castle, to the over-education of Irish 
people in Oxford, to agitation and lawyers. 
The cause lay far deeper. It lay in the rich 
national civilisation which the Irish genius had 
built up, strong in its courageous democracy, 
in its broad sympathies, in its widespread 
culture, in its freedom, and in its humanities. 
So long as the Irish language preserved to the 
people their old culture they never failed to 
absorb into their life every people that came 
among them. It was only when they lost 
hold of the tradition of their fathers and their 
old social order that this great influence fell 



114 IRISH NATIONALITY 

from them, and strangers no longer yielded 
to their power. 

The social fusion of Normans and Irish 
was the starting-point of a lively civilisation 
to which each race brought its share. To- 
gether they took a brilliant part in the com- 
merce which was broadening over the world. 
The Irish were great travellers; they sailed 
the Adriatic, journeyed in the Levant, visited 
the factories of Egypt, explored China, with 
all the old love of knowledge and infinite 
curiosity. They were as active and ingenious 
in business as the Normans themselves. 
Besides exporting raw materials, Irish-made 
linen and cloth and cloaks and leather were 
carried as far as Russia and Naples; Norman 
lords and Irish chieftains alike took in ex- 
change velvets, silks and satins, cloth of gold 
and embroideries, wines and spices. Irish gold- 
smiths made the rich vessels that adorned the 
tables both of Normans and Irish. Irish 
masons built the new churches of continental 
design, carving at every turn their own tradi- 
tional Irish ornaments. Irish scribes illumi- 
ated manuscripts which were as much praised 
in a Norman castle as in an Irish fort. Both 



THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 115 

peoples used translations into Irish made by 
Gaelic scholars from the fashionable Latin 
books of the Continent. Both races sent 
students and professors to every university 
in Europe — men recognised of deep knowl- 
edge among the most learned men of Italy 
and France. A kind of national education 
was being worked out. Not one of the Irish 
chiefdoms allowed its schools to perish, and 
to these ancient schools the settlers in the 
towns added others of their own, to which the 
Irish also in time flocked, so that youths of 
the two races learned together. As Irish was 
the common language, so Latin was the 
second tongue for cultivated people and for 
all men of business in their continental trade. 
The English policy made English the language 
of traitors to their people, but of no use 
either for trade or literature. 

The uplifting of the national ideal was 
shown in the fourteenth and fifteenth centu- 
ries by a revival of learning like that which 
followed the Danish wars. Not one of the 
hereditary houses of historians, lawyers, poets, 
physicians, seems to have failed: we find 
them at work in the mountains of Donegal, 



116 IRISH NATIONALITY 

along the Shannon, in lake islands, among 
the bare rocks of Clare, in the plains of Meath, 
in the valleys of Munster. In astronomy 
Irishmen were still first in Europe. In medi- 
cine they had all the science of their age. 
Nearly all our knowledge of Irish literature 
comes from copies of older works made by 
hundreds of industrious scribes of this period. 
From time to time Assemblies of all the 
learned men were called together by patriotic 
chiefs, or by kings rising into high leadership 
— " coming to Tara," as the people said. The 
old order was maintained in these national 
festivals. Spacious avenues of white houses 
were made ready for poets, streets of peaked 
hostels for musicians, straight roads of smooth 
conical-roofed houses for chroniclers, another 
avenue for bards and jugglers, and so on; 
and on the bright surface of the pleasant hills 
sleeping-booths of woven branches for the 
companies. From sea to sea scholars and 
artists gathered to show their skill to the men 
of Ireland; and in these glorious assemblies 
the people learned anew the wealth of their 
civilisation, and celebrated with fresh ardour 
the unity of the Irish nation. 



THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 117 

It was no wonder that in this high fervour 
of the country the Anglo-Normans, like the 
Danes and the Northumbrians before them, 
were won to a civilisation so vital and im- 
passioned, so human and gay* But the 
mixed civilisation found no favour with 
the government; the "wild Irish" and the 
"degenerate English" were no better than 
"brute beasts," the English said, abandoned 
to "filthy customs" amd to "a damnable 
law that was no law, hateful to God and 
man." Every measure was taken to destroy 
the growing amity of the peoples, not only 
by embroiling them in war, but by making 
union of Ireland impossible in religion or in 
education, and by destroying public confi- 
dence. The new central organisation of the 
Irish church made it a powerful weapon in 
English hands. An Englishman was at once 
put in every archbishopric and every prin- 
cipal see, a prelate who was often a Castle 
official as well, deputy, chancellor, justice, 
treasurer, or the like, or a good soldier — in 
any case hostile to every Irish affection. A 
national church in the old Irish sense dis- 
appeared; in the English idea the church was 



118 IRISH NATIONALITY 

to destroy the nation. Higher education was 
also denied to both races. No Irish univer- 
sity could live under the eye of an English 
primate of Armagh, and every attempt of 
Anglo-Normans to set up a university for 
Ireland at Dublin or Drogheda was instantly 
crushed. To avert general confidence and 
mutual understanding, an alien class was 
maintained in the country, who for consider- 
ations of wealth, power, a privileged posi- 
tion, betrayed the peace of Ireland to the 
profit of England. No pains, for example, 
were spared by the kings to conciliate and 
use so important a house as that of the earls 
of Ormond. For nearly two hundred years, 
as it happened, the heirs of this house were 
always minors, held in wardship by the king. 
English training at his court, visits to Lon- 
don, knighthoods and honours there, high 
posts in Ireland, prospects of new conquests 
of Irish land, a winking of government offi- 
cials at independent privileges used on their 
estates by Ormond lords — such influences 
tied each heir in turn to England, and 
separated them from Irish interests — a 
"loyal" house, said the English — "fair and 



THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 119 

false as Ormond," said the people of 
Ireland. 

Both races suffered under this foreign mis- 
rule. Both were brayed in the same mortar. 
Both were driven to the demand for home 
rule. The national movement never flagged 
for a single generation. Never for a moment 
did the Irish cease from the struggle; in the 
swell and tumult of that tossing sea com- 
manders emerged now in one province, now 
in another, each to fall back into the darkness 
while the next pressed on to take his place. 
An Anglo-Norman parliament claimed (1459) 
that Ireland was by its constitution separate 
from the laws and statutes of England, and 
prayed to have a separate coinage for their 
land as in the kingdom of England. Con- 
federacies of Irish and Anglo-Normans were 
formed, one following another in endless and 
hopeless succession. Through all civil strife 
we may plainly see the steady drift of the 
peoples to a common patriotism. There was 
panic in England at these ceaseless efforts to 
restore an Irish nation, for "Ireland," English 
statesmen said, "was as good as gone if a wild 
Irish wyrlinge should be chosen there asking." 



120 IRISH NATIONALITY 

For a time it seemed as if the house of the 
Fitzgeralds, the most powerful house in Ire- 
land, might mediate between the peoples 
whose blood, English and Irish, they shared. 
Earl Gerald of Desmond led a demand for 
home rule in 1341, and that Ireland should 
not be governed by "needy men sent from 
England, without knowledge of Ireland or 
its circumstances." Earl Gerald the Rhymer 
of the same house (1359) was a patriot leader 
too — a witty and ingenious composer of 
Irish poetry, who excelled all the English and 
many of the Irish in the knowledge of the 
Irish language, poetry, and history, and of 
other learning. A later Earl Gerald (1416), 
foster-son of O'Brien and cousin of Henry VI, 
was complimented by the Republic of Flor- 
ence, in a letter recalling the Florentine 
origin of the Fitzgeralds, for the glory he 
brought to that city, since its citizens had 
possessions as far as Hungary and Greece, 
and now "through you and yours bear sway 
even in Ibernia, the most remote island of 
the world." In Earl Thomas (1467) the Irish 
saw the first "foreigner" to be the martyr of 
their cause. He had furthered trade of 



THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 121 

European peoples with Irishmen; he had 
urgently pressed union of the races; he had 
planned a university for Ireland at Drogheda 
(Armagh having been long destroyed by the 
English). As his reward he was beheaded 
without trial by the earl of Worcester famed 
as "the Butcher," who had come over with 
a claim to some of the Desmond lands in Cork. 
His people saw in his death "the ruin of 
Ireland"; they laid his body with bitter 
lamentations by the Atlantic at Tralee, where 
the ocean wind moaning in the caverns still 
sounds to the peasants as "the Desmond's 
keen." 

Other Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare, who had 
married into every leading Irish house, took 
up in their turn the national cause. Garrett 
Mor "the great" (1477-1513), married to the 
cousin of Henry VII, made close alliances 
with every Irish chief, steadily spread his 
power over the land, and kept up the family 
relations with Florence; and by his wit, his 
daring, the gaiety of his battle with slander, 
fraud, and violence, won great authority. 
His son Garrett inherited and enlarged his 
great territory. Maynooth under him was 



122 IRISH NATIONALITY 

one of the richest earls' houses of that time. 
When he rode out in his scarlet cloak he was 
followed by four hundred Irish spearmen. 
His library was half of Irish books; he made 
his English wife read, write, and speak per- 
fectly the Irish tongue; he had for his chief 
poet an Irishman, "full of the grace of God 
and of learning"; his secretary was employed 
to write for his library "divers chronicles" 
of Ireland. The Irish loved him for his 
justice, for his piety, and that he put on them 
no arbitrary tax. By a singular charm of 
nature he won the hearts of all, wife, son, 
jailor in London Tower, and English lords. 

His whole policy was union in his country, 
and Ireland for the Irish. The lasting argu- 
ment for self-government as against rule from 
over-sea was heard in his cry to Wolsey and 
the lords at Westminster — "You hear of a 
case as it were in a dream, and feel not the 
smart that vexeth us." He attempted to 
check English interference with private sub- 
jects in Ireland. He refused to admit that a 
commission to Cardinal Wolsey as legate for 
England gave him authority in Ireland. 
The mark of his genius lay above all in his 



THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 123 

resolve to close dissensions and to put an 
end to civil wars. When as deputy he rode 
out to war against disturbed tribes, his first 
business was not to fight, but to call an 
assembly in the Irish manner which should 
decide the quarrel by arbitration according 
to law. He "made peace," his enemies said, 
and the nightmare of forced dissension gave 
way before this new statesmanship of national 
union. 

Never were the Irish "so corrupted by 
affection" for a lord deputy, never were they 
so obedient, both from fear and from love, 
so Henry VIII was warned. In spite of 
official intrigues, through all eddying acci- 
dents, the steady pressure of the country 
itself was towards union. 

The great opportunity had come to weld 
together the two races in Ireland, and to 
establish a common civilisation by a leader 
to whom both peoples were perfectly known, 
whose sympathies were engaged in both, and 
who as deputy of the English king had won 
the devoted confidence of the Irish people. 

There was one faction alone which no 
reason could convert — the alien minority 



124 IRISH NATIONALITY 

that held interests and possessions in both 
islands, and openly used England to advance 
their power and Ireland to increase their 
wealth. They had no country, for neither 
England nor Ireland could be counted such. 
They knew how to darken ignorance and 
inflame prejudice in London against their 
fellow-countrymen in Ireland — "the strange 
savage nature of the people," "savage vile 
poor persons which never did know or feel 
wealth or civility," "having no knowledge 
of the laws of God or of the king," nor 
any way to know them save through the 
good offices of these slanderers, apostles of 
their own virtue. The anti-national minority 
would have had no strength if left alone to 
face the growing toleration in Ireland. In 
support from England it found its sole 
security — and through its aid Ireland was 
flung back into disorder. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE TAKING OF THE LAND 

1520-1625 

Henry VIII, like Henry II, was not 
concerned to give "civilisation" to Ireland. 
He was concerned to take the land. His 
reasons were the same. If he possessed the 
soil in his own right, apart from the English 
parliament, and commanded its fighting-men 
and its wealth, he could beat down rebellion 
in England, smite Scotland into obedience, 
conquer France, and create an empire of 
bounds unknown — and in time of danger 
where so sure a shelter for a flying sovereign .^^ 
Claims were again revived to " our rightful 
inheritance"; quibbles of law once more 
served for the king's "title to the land"; 
there was another great day of deception in 
Dublin. Henry asked the title of King of 
Ireland instead of Lord, and offered to the 
chiefs in return full security for their lands. 

125 



126 miSH NATIONALITY 

For months of subtle preparation his promises 
were expHcit. All cause of offence was care- 
fully taken away. Finally a parliament was 
summoned (1541) of lords carefully bribed 
and commons carefully packed — the very 
pattern, in fact, of that which was later called 
to vote the Union. And while they were by 
order voting the title, the king and council 
were making arrangements together to render 
void both sides of the bargain. First the 
wording of the title was so altered as to 
take away any value in the "common con- 
sent" of parliament, since the king asserted 
his title to Ireland by inheritance and con- 
quest, before and beyond all mandate of 
the popular will. And secondly it was 
arranged that Henry was under no obliga- 
tion by negotiations or promises as to the 
land. For since, by the council's assurance 
to the king on the day the title was passed, 
there was no land occupied by any "disobe- 
dient" people which was not really the king's 
property by ancient inheritance or by con- 
fiscation, Henry might do as he would with 
his own. Royal concessions too must depend 
on how much revenue could be extracted 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 127 

from them to keep up suitably the title of 
king — on whether it was judicious to give 
Irishmen titles which they might afterwards 
plead to be valid — on whether Henry would 
find the promised grants convenient in case 
he chose later to proceed to "conquest and 
extermination." 

Parhament was dismissed for thirteen years, 
Henry, in fact, had exactly fulfilled the project 
of mystification he proposed twenty years 
before — "to be politically and secretly han- 
dled." Every trace of Irish law and land 
tenure must finally be abolished so that the 
soil should lie at the king's will alone, but 
this was to be done at first by secret and 
politic measures, here a little and there a 
little, so that, as he said, the Irish lords should 
as yet conceive no suspicion that they were 
to be "constrained to live under our law or 
put from all the lands by them now detained." 
"Politic practices," said Henry, would serve 
till such time as the strength of the Irish 
should be diminished, their leaders taken 
from them, and division put among themselves 
so that they join not together. If there had 
been any truth or consideration for Ireland 



128 IRISH NATIONALITY 

in the royal compact some hope of com- 
promise and conciliation might have opened. 
But the whole scheme was rooted and 
grounded in falsehood, and Ireland had yet 
to learn how far suflPerings by the quibbles 
and devices of law might exceed the disasters 
of open war. Chiefs could be ensnared one by 
one in misleading contracts, practically void. 
A false claimant could be put on a territory 
and supported by English soldiers in a civil 
war, till the actual chief was exiled or yielded 
the land to the king's ownership. No chief, 
true or false, had power to give away the 
people's land, and the king was face to face 
with an indignant people, who refused to 
admit an illegal bargain. Then came a 
march of soldiers over the district, hanging, 
burning, shooting "the rebels," casting the 
peasants out on the hillsides. There was 
also the way of "conquest." The whole 
of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and 
the countries made vacant and waste for 
English peopling: the sovereign's rule would 
be immediate and peremptory over those 
whom he had thus planted by his sole will, 
and Ireland would be kept subject in a way 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 129 

unknown in England; then "the king might 
say Ireland was clearly won, and after that 
he would be at little cost and receive great 
profits, and men and money at pleasure." 
There would be no such difficulty, Henry's 
advisers said as those of Henry II had said 
before, to "subdue or exile them as hath 
been thought," for from the settled lands 
plantation could be spread into the surround- 
ing territories, and the Irishry steadily pushed 
back into the sea. Henceforth it became a 
fixed policy to "exterminate and exile the 
country people of the Irishry." Whether 
they submitted or not, the king was to "in- 
habit their country" with English blood. 
But again as in the twelfth century it was the 
king and the metropolis that were to profit, 
not any class of inhabitants of Ireland. 

A series of great Confiscations put through 
an enslaved Pale parliament made smooth 
the way of conquest. An Act of 1536 for 
the attainder of the earl of Kildare confis- 
cated his estates to the king, that is, the main 
part of Leinster. In 1570 the bulk of Ulster, 
as territory of the "traitor" Shane O'Neill, 
was declared forfeited in the same way. And 



130 IRISH NATIONALITY 

in 1586 the chief part of Munster, the lordship 
of the "traitor" earl of Desmond. Another 
Act of 1536 forfeited to the crown all ancient 
claims of English lords to lands which had 
been granted to them, and afterwards re- 
covered by the original Irish owners. An- 
other in 1537 vested in the king all the lands of 
the dissolved monasteries. By these various 
titles given to the crown, it was hard for any 
acres to slip through unawares, English or 
Irish. An Act of 1569 moreover reduced 
all Ireland to shire land; in other words, all 
Irish chiefs who had made indentures with 
the crown were deprived of all the benefits 
which were included in such indentures, and 
the brehon or Irish law, with all its protection 
to the poor, was abolished. 

These laws and confiscations gave to the 
new sovereigns of the Irish the particular 
advantage that if their subjects should resist 
the taking of the land, they were legally 
"rebels," and as such outside the laws of 
war. It was this new fiction of law that gave 
the Tudor wars their unsurpassed horror. 
Thus began what Bacon called the "wild 
chase on the wild Irishmen." The forfeiture 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 131 

of land of the tribe for the crime of a chief 
was inconceivable in Irish law; the claim of 
the commonalty to unalterable possession of 
their soil was deeply engraven in the hearts 
of the people, who stood together to hold 
their land, believing justice and law to be on 
their side, and the right of near two thousand 
years of ordered possession. At a prodigious 
price, at inconceivable cost of human woe, 
the purging of the soil from the Irish race was 
begun. Such mitigations as the horrors of 
war allow were forbidden to these "rebels" 
by legal fiction. Torturers and hangmen 
went out with the soldiers. There was no 
protection for any soul; the old, the sick, 
infants, women, scholars; any one of them 
might be a landholder, or a carrier on of 
the tradition of the tribal owners, and was in 
any case a rebel appointed to death. No 
quarter was allowed, no faith kept, and no 
truce given. Chiefs were made to "draw 
and carry," to abase them before the tribes. 
Poets and historians were slaughtered and 
their books and genealogies burned, so that 
no man "might know his own grandfather" 
and all Irishmen be confounded in the same 



132 IRISH NATIONALITY 

ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, 
and all rights lost. The great object of the 
government was to destroy the whole tradi- 
tion, wipe out the Gaelic memories, and begin 
a new English life. 

But even with all legal aids to extermina- 
tion the land war proved more difficult than 
the English had expected. It lasted for some 
seventy years. The Irish were inexhaus- 
tible in defence, prodigious in courage, and 
endured hardships that Englishmen could 
not survive. The most powerful governors 
that England could supply were sent over, 
and furnished with English armies and stores. 
Fleets held the harbours, and across all the 
seas from Newfoundland to Dantzic gathered 
in provisions for the soldiers. Armies fed 
from the sea-ports chased the Irish through 
the winter months, when the trees were bare 
and naked and the kine without milk, killing 
every living thing and burning every granary 
of corn, so that famine should slay what the 
sword had lost. Out of the woods^ the 
famishing Irish came creeping on their hands, 
for their legs would not bear them, speaking 
like ghosts crying out of their graves, if they 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 133 

found a few water-cresses flocking as to a 
feast; so that in short space there were none 
almost left and a most populous and plentiful 
country suddenly left void of man and beast 
— a place where no voice was heard in ears 
save woe and fear and grief, a place where 
there was no pause for consolation nor ap- 
pearance of joy on face. 

Thus according to the English king's 
forecast was "the strength of the Irish 
diminished and their captains taken from 
them." One great house after another was 
swept out of Irish life. In 1529 the great 
earl of Kildare died of a broken heart in the 
Tower at the news that his son had been 
betrayed by a forged letter into a rising. 
His five brothers and his son, young Silken 
Thomas, captured by a false pledge of safety, 
were clapped all six of them into the Tower 
and hanged in London. The six outraged 
corpses at Tyburn marked the close of the 
first and last experiment in which a great 
ruler, sharing the blood of the two races, 
practised in the customs of both countries, 
would have led Ireland in a way of peace, 
and brought about through equal prosperity 



134 IRISH NATIONALITY 

and order a lasting harmony between the 
English and Irish people. Three hundred 
years later an old blackened pedigree kept 
in the Tower showed against the names of 
half the Fitzgeralds up to that time the words 
"Beheaded" or "Attainted" — so terrible 
were the long efforts to extinguish the talent 
and subdue the patriotism of that great family. 

Ormond, too, was "to be bridled." It was 
said his house was in no mood to hand over 
the "rule and obedience" of south Ireland 
to the king. At a feast at Ely House in 
Holborn (1547) the earl and seventeen of his 
followers lay dead out of thirty-five who had 
been poisoned. No inquiry was made into 
that crime. "God called him to His mercy," 
the Irish said of this patriot Ormond, "before 
he could see that day after which doubtless 
he longed and looked — the restitution of 
the house of Kildare." His son was held 
fast in London to be brought up, as far as 
education could do it, an Englishman. 

The third line of the Anglo-Norman leaders 
was laid low. The earl of Desmond, after 
twenty-five years of alternate prison and war, 
saw the chief leaders of his house hanged or 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 135 

slain, before he himself was killed in 1583: 
and his wretched son, born in the Tower, was 
brought from that prison to be shown to his 
heart-broken people — stunted in body, en- 
feebled in mind, half an idiot, a protestant — ■ 
"the Tower Earl," "the Queen's Earl," cried 
the people. 

The Irish chiefs were also broken by guile 
and assassination. O'Brien was separated 
from his people by a peerage (1543), an Eng- 
lish inauguration without the ancient rites 
as head of his lands, and an English guard of 
soldiers (1558). That house played no further 
part in the Irish struggle. 

The chief warrior of the north and terror 
of Elizabeth's generals was Shane O'Neill. 
The deputy Sidney devised many plots to 
poison or kill the man he could not conquer, 
and at last brought over from Scotland hired 
assassins who accomplished the murder (1567). 
A map made in the reign of Elizabeth marked 
the place of the crime that relieved England 
of her greatest fear — "Here Shane O'Neill 
was slain." After him the struggle of the 
north to keep their land and independence 
was maintained by negotiation and by war 



136 IRISH NATIONALITY 

for forty years, under the leading of the 
greatest of Irish statesmen and generals 
Hugh O'Neill earl of Tyrone, and the soldier- 
patriot Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell earl of 
Tirconnell. English intrigue triumphed when 
Red Hugh was poisoned by a secret agent 
(1602) and when by a crafty charge of con- 
spiracy his brother Rory O'Donnell and 
Hugh O'Neill were driven from their country 
(1607). The flight of the earls marked the 
destruction by violence of the old Gaelic 
polity — that federation of tribes which had 
made of their common country the storehouse 
of Europe for learning, the centre of the 
noblest mission-work that the continent ever 
knew, the home of arts and industries, the 
land of a true democracy where men held 
the faith of a people owning their soil, in- 
structed in their traditions, and themselves 
guardians of their national life. 

Henry VIII had found Ireland a land of 
Irish civilisation and law, with a people 
living by tribal tenure, and two races drawing 
together to form a new self-governing nation. 
A hundred years later, when Elizabeth and 
James I had completed his work, all the great 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 137 

leaders, Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disap- 
peared, the people had been half exterminated, 
alien and hostile planters set in their place, 
tribal tenure obliterated, every trace of Irish 
law swept clean from the Irish statute-book, 
and an English form of state government 
effectively established. 

Was this triumph due to the weakness of 
tribal government and the superior value of 
the feudal land tenure? How far, in fact, 
did the Irish civilisation invite and lend 
itself to this destruction? 

It has been said that it was by Irish soldiers 
that Irish liberties were destroyed. The 
Tudors and their councillors were under no 
such illusions. Their fear was that the 
Irish, if they suspected the real intention 
of the English, would all combine in one war; 
and in fact when the purpose of the govern- 
ment became clear in Ireland an English army 
of conquest had to be created. "Have no 
dread nor fear," cried Red Hugh to his Irish- 
men, ''of the great numbers of the soldiers 
of London, nor of the strangeness of their 
weapons and arms." Order after order went 
out to "weed the bands of Irish," to purge 



138 IRISH NATIONALITY 

the army of all "such dangerous people." 
Soldiers from England and from Berwick 
were brought over at double the pay of the 
Irish. For warmth and comfort they were 
clothed in Irish dress, only distinguished by 
red crosses on back and breast; and so the 
sight was seen of English soldiers in Irish 
clothing tearing from Irish men and women 
their Irish garments as the forbidden dress 
of traitors and rebels. Some official of 
Elizabeth's time made a list to please the 
English of a few names of Irishmen trait- 
orously slain by other Irishmen. There were 
murderers who had been brought up from 
childhood in an English house, detached 
from their own people; others were sent 
out to save their lives by bringing the head 
of a "rebel." The temper of the Irish 
people is better seen in the constant fidelity 
with which the whole people of Ulster and 
of Munster sheltered and protected for years 
O'Neill and Desmond and many another 
leader with a heavy price on his head. Not 
the poorest herdsman of the mountains 
touched the English gold. 

The military difficulties of the Irish, how- 



THE TAKING OF THE LAND 139 

ever, were such as to baffle skill and courage. 
England had been drilled by the kings that 
conquered her, and by the foreign wars she 
waged, into a powerful military nation by 
land and sea. Newly discovered gunpowder 
gave Henry VII the force of artillery. Henry 
VIII had formed the first powerful fleet. 
The new-found gold of Brazil, the wealth 
of the Spanish main, had made England 
immensely rich. In this moment of growing 
strength the whole might of Great Britain 
was thrown on Ireland, the smaller island. 
The war, too, had a peculiar animosity; the 
fury of Protestant fanaticism was the cloak 
for the king's ambition, the resolve of English 
traders to crush Irish competition, the greed 
of prospective planters. No motive was 
lacking to increase its violence. Ireland, on 
the other hand, never conquered, and con- 
templating no conquest on her part, was not 
organised as an aggressive and military 
nation. Her national spirit was of another 
type. But whatever had been her organisa- 
tion it is doubtful whether any device could 
have saved her from the force of the English 
invasion. Dublin could never be closed from 



140 IRISH NATIONALITY 

within against enemies coming across the 
sea. The island was too small to give any 
means of escape to defeated armies while 
they were preparing for a new defence. They 
could not disappear, for example, like the 
Dutch of the Cape Colony into vast desert 
regions which gave them shelter while they 
built up a new state. Every fugitive within 
the circuit of Ireland could be presently found 
and hunted down. The tribal system, too, 
which the Tudor sovereigns found, was no 
longer in full possession of Ireland; the de- 
fence was now carried on not by a tribal 
Gaelic people but by a mixed race, half feudal 
and half tribal by tradition. But it was the 
old Irish inheritance of national freedom 
which gave to Ireland her desperate power 
of defence, so that it was only after such pro- 
digious efforts of war and plantation that the 
bodies of her people were subdued, while their 
minds still remained free and unenslaved. 

If, moreover, the Irish system had dis- 
appeared so had the English. As we shall 
see the battle between the feudal tradition 
and the tribal tradition in Ireland had ended 
in the violent death of both. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH 
C. 1600-C. 1660 

We have seen already two revivals of 
Irish life, when after the Danish settlement, 
and after the Norman, the native civilisa- 
tion triumphed. Even now, after confisca- 
tions and plantations, the national tradition 
was still maintained with unswerving fidelity. 
Amid contempt, persecution, proscription, 
death, the outcast Irish cherished their 
language and poetry, their history and law, 
with the old pride and devotion. In that 
supreme and unselfish loyalty to their race 
they found dignity in humiliation and pa- 
tience in disaster, and have left, out of the 
depths of their poverty and sorrow, one of 
the noblest examples in history. 

Their difficulties were almost inconceiv- 
able. The great dispersion had begun of 

141 



142 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigra- 
tion. Twenty thousand Irish were reported 
in a single island of the West Indies in 1643; 
thirty thousand were said to be wandering 
about Europe; in 1653 four thousand soldiers 
were transported to Flanders for the war of 
the king of Spain. Numbers went to seek 
the education forbidden at home in a multi- 
tude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They 
became chancellors of universities, profes- 
sors, high officials in every European state 
— a Kerry man physician to the king of 
Poland; another Kerry man confessor to the 
queen of Portugal and sent by the king on 
an embassy to Louis XIV; a Donegal man, 
O'Glacan, physician and privy councillor to 
the king of France, and a very famed pro- 
fessor of medicine in the universities of Tou- 
louse and Bologna (1646-1655); and so on. 
We may ask whether in the history of the 
world there was cast out of any country such 
genius, learning, and industry, as the Eng- 
lish flung, as it were, into the sea. With every 
year the number of exiles grew. "The same 
to me," wrote one, "are the mountain or 
ocean, Ireland or the west of Spain; I have 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 143 

shut and made fast the gates of sorrow over 
my heart." 

As for the Irish at home, every vestige of 
their tradition was doomed — their rehgion 
was forbidden, and the Staff of Patrick and 
Cross of Columcille destroyed, with every 
other national reHc; their schools were scat- 
tered, their learned men hunted down, their 
books burned; native industries were abol- 
ished; the inauguration chairs of their chiefs 
were broken in pieces, and the law of the 
race torn up, codes of inheritance, of land 
tenure, of contract between neighbours or 
between lord and man. The very image of 
Justice which the race had fashioned for 
itself was shattered. Love of country and 
every attachment of race and history became 
a crime, and even Irish language and dress 
were forbidden under penalty of outlawry 
or excommunication. "No more shall any 
laugh there," wrote the poet, "or children 
gambol; music is choked, the Irish language 
chained." The people were wasted by thou- 
sands in life and in death. The invaders 
supposed the degradation of the Irish race 
to be at last completed. "Their youth and 



144 IRISH NATIONALITY 

gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone 
to France," wrote one: "those that are 
left are destitute of horses, arms and money, 
capacity and courage. Five in six of the 
Irish are poor, insignificant slaves, fit for 
nothing but to hew wood and draw water." 
Such were the ignorant judgments of the new 
people, an ignorance shameful and criminal. 

The Irish, meanwhile, at home and in 
the dispersion, were seeking to save out of 
the wreck their national traditions. Three 
centres were formed of this new patriotic 
movement — in Rome, in Louvain, and in 
Ireland itself. 

An Irish College of Franciscans was es- 
tablished in Rome (1625) by the efforts of 
Luke Wadding, a Waterford man, divine of 
the Spanish embassy at Rome. The Pope 
granted to the Irish the church of St. Isidore, 
patron of Madrid, which had been occupied 
by Spanish Franciscans. Luke Wadding, 
founder and head of the college, was one of 
the most extraordinary men of his time for 
his prodigious erudition, the greatest school- 
man of that age, and an unchanging and 
impassioned patriot. He prepared the first 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 145 

full edition of the works of the great Irish 
scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, with the 
help of his fellow-countrymen, Thomas 
Strange, Anthony Hickey, John Ponce of 
Cork, Hugh MacCawell of Tyrone; and 
projected a general history of Ireland for 
which materials were being collected in 1628 
by Thomas Walsh, archbishop of Cashel. 
The College was for the service of "the 
whole nation," for all Irishmen, no matter 
from what province, "so long as they be 
Irish." They were bound by rule to speak 
Irish, and an Irish book was read during 
meals. 

No spot should be more memorable to 
Irishmen than the site of the Franciscan 
College of St. Antony of Padua at Louvain. 
A small monastery of the Freres de Charite 
contains the few pathetic relics that are left 
of the noble company of Irish exiles who 
gathered there from 1609 for mutual comfort 
and support, and of the patriots and soldiers 
laid to rest among them — O'Neills, O'Do- 
hertys, O'Donnells, Lynches, Murphys, and 
the rest, from every corner of Ireland. 
"Here I break off till morning," wrote one 



146 IRISH NATIONALITY 

who laboured on a collection of Irish poems 
from 1030 to 1630, "and I in gloom and 
grief; and during my life's length unless 
only that I might have one look at Ireland." 
The fathers had mostly come of the old 
Irish literary clans, and were trained in the 
traditional learning of their race; such as 
Father O'Mulloy, distinguished in his deep 
knowledge of the later poetic metres, of 
which he wrote in his Latin and Irish Gram- 
mar; or Bonaventura O'h'Eoghasa, trained 
among the poets of Ireland, who left "her 
holy hills of beauty" with lamentation to 
"try another trade" with the Lou vain 
brotherhood. Steeped in Irish lore the 
Franciscans carried on the splendid record 
of the Irish clergy as the twice-beloved 
guardians of the inheritance of their race. 
"Those fathers," an Irish scholar of that 
day wrote, "stood forward when she (Ire- 
land) was reduced to the greatest distress, 
nay, threatened with certain destruction, and 
vowed that the memory of the glorious 
deeds of their ancestors should not be con- 
signed to the same earth that covered the 
bodies of her children . . . that the ancient 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 147 

glory of Ireland should not be entombed by 
the same convulsion which deprived the 
Irish of the lands of their fathers and of 
all their property." More fortunate than 
scholars in Ireland thay had a printing- 
press; and used it to send out Irish gram- 
mars, glossaries, catechisms, poems. Hugh 
Mac an-Bhaird of Donegal undertook to 
compile the Acta Sanctorum, for which a lay- 
brother, Michael O'Clery, collected materials 
in Ireland for ten years, and Patrick Fleming 
of Louth gathered records in Europe. At 
Hugh's death, in 1635, the task was taken up 
by Colgan, born at Culdaff on the shore of 
Inishowen (f 1658). The work of the fathers 
was in darkness and sorrow. "I am wasting 
and perishing with grief," wrote Hugh Bourke 
to Luke Wadding, "to see how insensibly 
nigher and nigher draws the catastrophe 
which must inflict mortal wounds upon our 
country." 

Ireland herself, however, remained the 
chief home of historical learning in the broad 
national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Hiab- 
hach, a Munster chief, skilled in old and 
modern Irish, Latin, English, and Spanish, 



148 IRISH NATIONALITY 

wrote a historv of Ireland to the Norman 
invasion in the beautiful hand taught him by 
Irish scribes; it was written while he lay 
imprisoned in London from 1589 to 1626, 
mad at times through despair. One of a 
neighbouring race of seafaring chiefs, O'Sulli- 
van Beare, an emigrant and captain in the 
Spanish navy, published in 1621 his indignant 
recital of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. 
It was in hiding from the president of Mun- 
ster, in the wood of Aharlo, that Father 
Geoffrey Keating made (before 1633) his 
Irish history down to the Norman settlement 
— written for the masses in clear and winning 
style, the most popular book perhaps ever 
written in Irish, and copied throughout the 
country by hundreds of eager hands. In the 
north meanwhile Michael O'Clery and his 
companions, two O'Clerys of Donegal, 
two O'Maelchonaires of Roscommon, and 
O'Duibhgeanain of Leitrim, were writing the 
Annals of the Four Masters (1632-6); all of 
them belonging to hereditary houses of chron- 
iclers. In that time of sorrow, fearing the 
destruction of every record of his people, 
O'Clery travelled through all Ireland to 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 149 

gather up what could be saved, '"though it 
was difficult to collect them to one place." 
There is still preserved a manuscript by 
Caimhin, abbot of Iniscaltra about 650, which 
was given to O'Clery by the neighbouring 
Mac Brodys who had kept it safe for a thou- 
sand years. The books were carried to the huts 
and cottages where the friars of Donegal lived 
round their ruined monastery; from them 
the workers had food and attendance, while 
Fergal O'Gara, a petty chieftain of Sligo 
descended from Olioll, king of Munster in 
260, gave them a reward for their labours. 
Another O'Clery wrote the story of Aedh 
Ruadh O'Donnell, his prisons and his battles, 
and the calamity to Ireland of his defeat. 
"Then were lost besides nobility and honour, 
generosity and great deeds, hospitality and 
goodness, courtesy and noble birth, polish 
and bravery, strength and courage, valour 
and constancy, the authority and the sov- 
ereignty of the Irish of Erin to the end of 
time." 

In Gal way a group of scholars laid, in 
Lynch's words, "a secure anchorage" for 
Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous 



150 IRISH NATIONALITY 

apologist of the Irish, wrote there his his- 
torical defence of his people. To spread 
abroad their history he translated into Latin 
Keating's book. For the same purpose his 
friend, Tuileagna O'Maelchonaire, a distin- 
guished Irish scholar, translated the Annals 
of Ulster into English. O'Flaherty of Moy- 
cullen in Galway, a man of great learning, 
wrote on Irish antiquities "with exactness, 
diligence and judgment." "I live," he said, 
"a banished man within the bounds of my 
native soil, a spectator of others enriched by 
my birthright, an object of condoling to my 
relations and friends, and a condoler of their 
miseries." His land confiscated (1641), 
stripped at last of his manuscripts as well 
as of his other goods, he died in miserable 
poverty in extreme old age (1709). To Gal- 
way came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585- 
1670), of a family that had been time out of 
mind hereditary historians in north Con- 
nacht. He learned in one of the old Irish 
schools of law in Tipperary Latin, English, 
and Greek. Amid the horrors of Cromwell's 
wars he carried out a prodigious work on the 
genealogies of the clans, the greatest, perhaps. 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 151 

that exists in any country; and wrote on 
their saints, their kings, their writers, on the 
chronicles and on the laws; in moderate 
prosperity and in extreme adversity con- 
stantly devoted to the preservation of Irish 
history. In his old age he lived, like other 
Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the 
estates that had once belonged to his family 
and race; the last of the hereditary senna- 
chies of Ireland he wandered on foot from 
house to house, every Irish door opened to 
him for his learning after their undying 
custom, till at the age of eighty-five he was 
murdered by a Crofton when he was resting 
in a house on his way to Dublin. In Con- 
nacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of Leitrim, 
a diligent collector of Irish manuscripts, 
who gathered thirty books of law, and many 
others of philosophy, poetry, physic, gene- 
alogies, mathematics, romances, and history; 
and defended against the English the char- 
acter of the old law and civilisation of 
Ireland. 

It would be long to tell of the workers in 
all the Irish provinces — the lawyers hiding 
in their bosoms the genealogies and tenures 



152 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of their clans — the scribes writing annals 
and genealogies, to be carried, perhaps, when 
Irishmen gathered as for a hurling-match 
and went out to one of their old places of 
assembly, there to settle their own matters 
by their ancient law. No printing-press 
could be set up among the Irish; they were 
driven back on oral tradition and laborious 
copying by the pen. Thus for about a 
hundred years Keating's History was passed 
from hand to hand after the old manner in 
copies made by devoted Irish hands (one 
of them a "farmer"), in Leitrim, Tipperary, 
Kildare, Clare, Limerick, Kilkenny, all over 
the country; it was only in 1723 that Dermot 
O' Conor translated it into English and printed 
it in Dublin. It is amazing how amid the 
dangers of the time scribes should be found 
to re-write and re-edit the mass of manu- 
scripts, those that were lost and those that 
have escaped. 

The poets were still the leaders of national 
patriotism. The great "Contention of the 
Poets" — "lomarbhagh na bhfiledh" — a bat- 
tle that lasted for years between the bards of 
the O'Briens and the O'Donnells, in which 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 153 

the bards of every part of Ireland joined — 
served to rouse the pride of the Irish in 
their history amid their calamities under 
James I. The leader of the argument, Tadhg 
Mac Daire, lord of an estate with a castle as 
chief poet of Thomond, was hurled over a 
cliff in his old age by a Cromwellian soldier 
with the shout, "Say your rann now, little 
man!" Tadhg O'h'Uiginn of Sligo (tl617), 
Eochaidh O'h'Eoghasa of Fermanagh, were 
the greatest among very many. Bards whose 
names have often been forgotten spread the 
poems of the Ossianic cycle, and wrote verses 
of several kinds into which a new gloom and 
despair entered — 

" Though yesterday seemed to me long and ill. 
Yet longer still was this dreary day." 

The bards were still for a time trained in 
"the schools" — low thatched buildings shut 
away by a sheltering wood, where students 
came for six months of the year. None were 
admitted who could not read and write, and 
use a good memory; none but those who had 
come of a bardic tribe, and of a far district, 
lest they should be distracted by friends and 



154 IRISH NATIONALITY 

relations. The Scottish Gaels and the Irish 
were united as of old in the new literature; 
Irish bards and harpers were as much at home 
in the Highlands and in the Isles as in Ireland, 
and the poems of the Irish bards were as 
popular there as in Munster. Thus the unity 
of feeling of the whole race was preserved 
and the bards still remained men who be- 
longed to their country rather than to a 
clan or territory. But with the exile of the 
Irish chiefs, with the steady ruin of "the 
schools," poets began to throw aside the old 
intricate metres and the old words no longer 
understood, and turned to the people, put- 
ting away "dark difficult language" to bring 
literature to the common folk: there were 
even translations made for those who were 
setting their children to learn the English 
instead of their native tongue. Born of an 
untold suffering, a burst of melody swept 
over Ireland, scores and scores of new and 
brilliant metres, perhaps the richest attempt 
to convey music in words ever made by man. 
In that unfathomed experience, they tell 
how seeking after Erin over all obstacles, 
they found her fettered and weeping, and 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 155 

for their loyalty she gave them the last gift 
left to her, the light of poetry. 

In Leinster of the English, "the cemetery 
of the valorous Gael," Irish learning had a 
different story. There it seemed for a moment 
that it might form a meeting-point between 
the new race and the old, joining together, 
as the Catholics put it, "our commonwealth 
men," a people compounded of many nations, 
some Irish by birth and descent, others by 
descent only, others neither by descent nor 
by birth but by inhabitation of one soil; 
but all parts of one body politic, acknowl- 
edging one God, conjoined together in alle- 
giance to one and the same sovereign, united 
in the fruition of the selfsame air, and tied 
in subsistence upon this our natural soil 
whereupon we live together. 

A tiny group of scholars in Dublin had 
begun to study Irish history. Sir James 
Ware (1594-1666), born there of an English 
family, "conceived a great love for his native 
country and could not bear to see it aspersed 
by some authors, which put him upon doing 
it all the justice he could in his writings." 
He spared no cost in buying valuable manu- 



156 IRISH NATIONALITY 

scripts, kept an Irish secretary to translate, 
and employed for eleven years the great 
scholar O'Flaherty whose help gave to his 
work its chief value. Ussher, archbishop of 
Armagh, also born in Dublin, devoted him- 
self to the study of Irish antiquities. Baron 
d ' Aungier, Master of the Rolls, put into writ- 
ing every point which he could find in original 
documents "which for antiquity or singularity 
might interest this country." The enthusi- 
asm of learning drew together Protestant and 
Catholic, Anglo-Irish and Irish. All these 
men were in communication with Luke 
Wadding in Rome through Thomas Strange 
the Franciscan, his intimate friend; they 
sent their own collections of records to help 
him in his Catholic history of Irish saints, 
"being desirous that Wadding's book should 
see the light," wishing "to help him in his 
work for Ireland," begging to see "the veriest 
trifle" that he wrote. The noblest English 
scholar was Bishop Bedell, who while pro- 
vost established an Irish lecture in Trinity 
College, had the chapter during commons 
read in Irish, and employed a Sheridan of 
Cavan to translate the Old Testament into 



NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 157 

Irish. As bishop he braved the anger of the 
government by declaring the hardships of 
the CathoHc Irish, and by circulating a cate- 
chism in EngKsh and Irish. Bitterly did 
Ussher reproach him for such a scandal at 
which the professors of the gospel did all 
take offence, and for daring to adventure that 
which his brethren had been "so long abuild- 
ing," the destruction of the Irish language. 
The Irish alone poured out their love and 
gratitude to Bedell; they protected him in 
the war of 1641; the insurgent chieftains 
fired volleys over his grave paying homage 
to his piety; "sit anima mea cum Bedello!" 
cried a priest. He showed what one just 
man, caring for the people and speaking to 
them in their own tongue, could do in a few 
years to abolish the divisions of race and 
religion. 

The light, however, that had risen in Dub- 
lin was extinguished. Sympathies for the 
spirit of Irishmen in their long history were 
quenched by the greed for land, the passion 
of commerce, and the fanaticism of ascend- 
ancy and dominion. 



CHAPTER X 

RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT 

1640-1750 

The aim which EngHsh kings had set before 
them for the last four hundred years seemed 
now fulfilled. The land was theirs, and the 
dominion. But the victory turned to dust 
and ashes in their hands. The "royal in- 
heritance" of so many hopes had practically 
disappeared; for if the feudal system which 
was to give the king the land of Ireland had 
destroyed the tribal system, it was itself dead; 
decaying and intolerable in England, it could 
no longer be made to serve in Ireland. Hen- 
ry's dream of a royal army from Ireland, 
"a sword and flay" at the king's use against 
his subjects in Great Britain, perished; 
Charles I did indeed propose to use the Irish 
fighting-men to smite into obedience England 
and Scotland, but no king of England tried 

that experiment again. James II looked to 

158 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 159 

Ireland, as in Henry's scheme, for a safe place 
of refuge to fly to in danger; that, again, no 
king of England tried a second time. As for 
the king's revenues and profits, the dream of 
so many centuries, that too vanished: con- 
fiscations old and new which the English 
parliament allowed the Crown for Irish 
government left the king none the richer, and 
after 1692 no longer sufficed even for Irish 
expenses. The title of "King of Ireland" 
which Henry VIII had proclaimed in his own 
right with such high hopes, bred out of its 
original deception other deceptions deeper and 
blacker than the first. The sovereign saw his 
absolute tyranny gradually taken out of his 
hands by the parliament and middle class for 
their own benefit; the rule of the king was 
passing, the rule of the English parliament 
had begun. 

Thus past history was as it were wiped out. 
Everything in Ireland was to be new. The 
social order was now neither feudal nor tribal, 
nor anything known before. Other methods 
had been set up, without custom, tradition, 
or law behind them. There were two new 
classes, English planters and Irish toilers. No 



160 IRISH NATIONALITY 

old ties bound them, and no new charities. 
"From the Anglo-Irish no man of special 
sanctity as yet is known to have sprung," 
observed a Gael of that day. Ancient patri- 
mony had fallen. The new aristocracy was 
that of the strong hand and the exploiter's 
greed. Ordinary restraints of civilised so- 
cieties were not yet born in this pushing 
commercial throng, where the scum of Great 
Britain, broken men or men flying from the 
law, hastened — "hoping to be without fear 
of man's justice in a land where there was 
nothing, or but little as yet, of the fear of 
God." Ireland was left absolutely without 
guides or representatives. There were no 
natural leaders of the country among the 
new men, each fighting for his own hand; the 
English government permitted none among 
the Irish. 

England too was being made new, with 
much turmoil and confusion — an England 
where kings were yielding to parliaments, and 
parliaments were being subdued to the rising 
commercial classes. The idea of a separate 
royal power and profit had disappeared and 
instead of it had come the rule and profit of 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 161 

the parliament of England, and of her noble- 
men, ecclesiastics, and traders in general. 

This new rule marked the first revolution in 
the English government of Ireland which had 
happened since Henry II sat in his Dublin 
palace. By the ancient constitution assured 
by compacts and grants since English laws 
were first brought into that country, Ireland 
was united to the Crown of England as a free 
and distinct kingdom, with the right of hold- 
ing parliaments subject only to the king and 
his privy council; statutes of the English 
parliament had not force of law there until 
they had been re-enacted in Ireland — which 
indeed was necessary by the very theory of 
parliaments, for there were no Irish repre- 
sentatives in the English Houses. Of its mere 
will the parliament of England now took to 
itself authority to make laws for Ireland in as 
free and uncontrolled a manner as if no Irish 
parliament existed. The new ruling classes 
had neither experience nor training. Regard- 
less of any legal technicalities they simply 
usurped a power unlimited and despotic over 
a confused and shattered Ireland. Now was 
seen the full evil of government from over-sea. 



162 IRISH NATIONALITY 

where before a foreign tribunal, sitting at a 
distance, ignorant and prejudiced, the subject 
people had no voice; they could dispute no 
lie, and could affirm no truth. 

This despotism grew up regardless of any 
theory of law or constitution. The intention 
was unchanged — the taking of all Irish land, 
the rooting out of the old race from the coun- 
try. Adventurers were tempted by Irish 
wealth; what had once been widely diffused 
among the Irish tribes was gathered into the 
hands of a few aliens, who ruthlessly wasted 
the land for their own great enrichment. Enor- 
mous profits fell to planters, who could get 
three times as much gain from an Irish as 
from an English estate by a fierce exploiting 
of the natural resources of the island and of its 
cheap outlawed labour. Forests of oak were 
hastily destroyed for quick profits; woods 
were cut down for charcoal to smelt the iron 
which was carried down the rivers in cunning 
Irish boats, and what had cost £10 in labour 
and transport sold at £17 in London. The 
last furnace was put out in Kerry when the 
last wood had been destroyed. Where the 
English adventurer passed he left the land as 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 163 

naked as if a forest fire had swept over the 
country. 

For the exploiter's rage, for the waster's 
madness, more land was constantly needed. 
Three provinces had been largely planted by 
1620 — one still remained. By a prodigious 
fraud James I, and after him Charles I in 
violation of his solemn promise, proposed to 
extirpate the Irish from Connacht. The 
maddened people were driven to arms in 1641. 
The London parliament which had just 
opened the quarrel with the king which was to 
end in his beheading, seized their opportunity 
in Ireland. Instantly London City, and a 
House of Commons consisting mainly of Puri- 
tan adventurers, joined in speculations to buy 
up "traitors' lands," openly sold in London at 
£100 for a thousand acres in Ulster or for six 
hundred in Munster, and so on in every 
province. It was a cheap bargain, the value 
of forfeited lands being calculated by parlia- 
ment later at £2,500 for a thousand acres. 
The more rebels the more forfeitures, and 
every device of law and fraud was used to fling 
the whole people into the war, either in fact or 
in name, and so destroy the claim of the whole 



164 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of them to their lands. "Wild Irishmen," 
the English said to one another, "had nothing 
but the human form to show that they were 
men." Letters were forged and printed in 
England, purporting to give Irish news; dis- 
countenanced by parliament, they still mark 
the first experiment to appeal in this way to 
London on the Irish question. Parliament 
did its utmost to make the contest a war of 
extermination: it ended, in fact, in the death 
of little less than half the population. 

The Commons' auction of Irishmen's lands 
in 1641, their conduct of a war of distinguished 
ferocity, these were the acts by which the 
Irish first knew government by an English 
parliament. The memory of the black curse 
of Cromwell lives among the people. He 
remains in Ireland as the great exemplar of 
inhuman cruelties, standing amid these scenes 
of woe with praises to God for such manifest 
evidence of His inspiration. The speculators 
got their lands, outcast women and children 
lay on the wayside devoured by wolves and 
birds of prey. By order of parliament (1653) 
over 20,000 destitute men, women, and 
children from twelve years were sold into the 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 165 

service of English planters in Virginia and the 
Carolinas. Slave-dealers were let loose over 
the country, and the Bristol merchants did 
good business. With what bitter irony an 
Irishman might contrast the "civilisation" 
of the English and the "barbarism" of the 
Irish — if we talk, he said, about civility and a 
civil manner of contract of selling and buying, 
there is no doubt that the Anglo-Irish born in 
cities have had more opportunity to acquire 
civility than the Old Irish; but if the question 
be of civility, of good manners, of liberality, 
of hospitality, and charity towards all, these 
virtues dwelt among the Irish. 

Kings were restored to carry out the will 
of parliament. Charles II at their bidding 
ignored the treaty of his father that the Irish 
who submitted should return to their lands 
(1661): at the mere appearance of keeping 
promise to a few hundred Catholic landowners 
out of thousands, the Protestant planters sent 
out their threats of insurrection. A deeper 
misery was reached when William III led his 
army across the Boyne and the Shannon 
(1690). In grave danger and difficulty he was 
glad to win peace by the Treaty of Limerick, 



166 IRISH NATIONALITY 

in which the Irish were promised the quiet 
exercise of their reHgion. The Treaty was 
immediately broken. The EngHsh parliament 
objected to any such encouragement of Irish 
Papists, and demanded that no pardons should 
be given or estates divided save by their 
advice, and William said no word to uphold 
the public faith. The pledge of freedom of 
worship was exchanged for the most infamous 
set of penal laws ever placed on a Statute- 
book. 

The breaking of the Treaty of Limerick, 
conspicuous among the perfidies to Ireland, 
inaugurated the century of settled rule 
by the parliament of England (1691-178^). 
Its first care was to secure to English Prot- 
estants their revenues in Ireland; the plant- 
ers, one-fourth of the people of Ireland, were 
established as owners of four-fifths of Irish 
soil; and one-half of their estates, the land 
confiscated under Cromwell and William, 
they held by the despotic grant of the English 
parliament. This body, having outlawed 
four thousand Irishmen, and seized a million 
and a half of their acres, proceeded to crush 
the liberties of its own English settlers by 



KULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 167 

simply issuing statutes for Ireland of its sole 
authority. The acts were as tyrannical in 
their subject as in their origin. One (1691)5 
which ordered that no Catholic should sit in 
the Irish Houses, deprived three-fourths of 
the people of representatives, and left to one- 
fourth alone the right of citizens. Some 
English judges decided, without and against 
Irish legal opinion, that the privy councils in 
Dublin and London had power to alter Irish 
bills before sending them to the king. "If an 
angel came from heaven that was a privy 
councillor I would not trust my liberty with 
him one moment," said an English member 
of that time. 

All liberties were thus rooted out. The 
planters' rights were overthrown as pitilessly 
as those of the Irish they had expelled. 
Molyneux, member for Dublin university, set 
forth in 1698 the "Case of Ireland." He 
traced its constitution for five centuries; 
showed that historically there had never been 
a "conquest" of Ireland, and that all its 
civil liberties were grounded on compact and 
charter; and declared that his native land 
shared the claims of all mankind to justice. 



168 IRISH NATIONALITY 

"To tax me without consent is little better, if 
at all, than downright robbing me. I am sure 
the great patriots of liberty and property, the 
free people of England, cannot think of such 
a thing but with abhorrence." "There may 
be ill consequences," he cried, "if the Irish 
come to think their rights and liberties were 
taken away, their parliaments rendered nuga- 
tory, and their lives and fortunes left to 
depend on the will of a legislature wherein 
they are not parties." The "ill consequences " 
were seen seventy years later when Molyneux' 
book became the text-book of Americans in 
their rising against English rule; and when 
Anglo-Irish defenders of their own liberties 
were driven to make common cause with 
their Irish compatriots — for "no one or more 
men," said Molyneux, "can by nature chal- 
lenge any right, liberty, or freedom, or any 
ease in his property, estate, or conscience 
which all other men have not an equally just 
claim to." But that day was far off. For 
the moment the Irish parliament deserved and 
received entire contempt from England. The 
gentry who had accepted land and power by 
the arbitrary will of the English House of 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 169 

Commons dared not dispute the tyranny that 
was the warrant of their property: "I hope," 
was the ironic answer, "the honourable mem- 
ber will not question the validity of his title." 
With such an argument at hand, the EngKsh 
parliament had no need of circumspection or 
of soft words. It simply condemned Moly- 
neux and his remonstrance, demanded of the 
king to maintain the subordination of Ireland, 
and to order the journals of its parliaments to 
be laid before the Houses at Westminster; 
and on the same day required of him, since 
the Irish were "dependent on and protected 
by England in the enjoyment of all they had," 
to forbid them to continue their woollen 
trade, but leave it entire to England. In 1719 
it declared its power at all times to make 
laws which should bind the people of Ireland. 
Thus an English parliament which had 
fought for its own liberties established a 
hierarchy of tyranny for Ireland: the Anglo- 
Irish tied under servitude to England, and the 
Irish chained under an equal bondage to the 
Anglo-Irish. As one of the governors of Ire- 
land wrote a hundred years later, "I think 
Great Britain may still easily manage the 



170 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Protestants, and the Protestants the Catho- 
lics." Such was the servile position of English 
planters. They had made their bargain. .To 
pay the price of wealth and ascendency they 
sold their own freedom and the rights of their 
new country. The smaller number, said 
Burke, were placed in power at the expense of 
the civil liberties and properties of the far 
greater, and at the expense of the civil lib- 
erties of the whole. 

Ireland was now degraded to a subject 
colony. The government never proposed 
that Englishmen in Ireland should be on 
equal terms with English in England. Strin- 
gent arrangements were made to keep Ireland 
low. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended 
while the English parliament ruled. Judges 
were removable at pleasure. Precautions 
were taken against the growth of "an Irish 
interest." By a variety of devices the parlia- 
ment of English Protestants was debased to a 
corrupt and ignoble servitude. So deep was 
their subjection that Ireland was held in 
England to be "no more than a remote part 
of their dominion, which was not accustomed 
to figure on the theatre of politics." Govern- 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 171 

ment by Dublin Castle was directed in the 
sole interest of England; the greatest posts in 
the Castle, the Law, the Church, were given 
to Englishmen, "king-fishers," as the nick- 
name went of the churchmen. *'I fear much 
blame here," said the English premier in 1774, 
"... if I consent to part with the disposal 
of these offices which have been so long and 
so uniformly bestowed upon members of the 
British parliament." Castle officials were 
expected to have a single view to English 
interests. In speeches from the throne 
governors of Ireland formally spoke of the 
Irish people, the majority of their subjects, 
as "the common enemy"; they were scarcely 
less suspicious of the English Protestants; 
"it is worth turning in your mind," one wrote 
to Pitt, "how the violence of both parties 
might be turned on this occasion to the 
advancement of England." 

One tyranny begot another. Irish mem- 
bers, having no liberties to defend, and no 
country to protect, devoted themselves to the 
security of their property — its security and 
increase. All was quiet. There was no fear 
in Ireland of a rising for the Pretender. The 



172 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Irish, true to their ancient horror of violence 
for reHgion, never made a rehgious war, and 
never desired that which was ever repugnant 
to the Irish spirit, temporal ascendency for a 
spiritual faith. Their only prayer was for 
freedom in worship — that same prayer which 
Irish Catholics had presented in the parlia- 
ment of James I (1613), "indented with sor- 
row, signed with tears, and delivered in this 
house of peace and liberty with our disarmed 
hands." Protestants had never cause for 
fear in Ireland on religious grounds. In queen 
Mary's persecution Protestants flying from 
England had taken shelter in Ireland among 
Irish Catholics, and not a hand was raised 
against them there. Bitter as were the poets 
against the English exterminators, no Irish 
curse has been found against the Protestant 
for his religion, even through the black time 
of the penal laws. The parliament, however, 
began a series of penal laws against Irish 
Catholics. They were forbidden the use of 
their religion, almost every means of liveli- 
hood, every right of a citizen, every family 
affection. Their possessions were scattered, 
education was denied them, when a father 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 173 

died his children were handed over to a Prot- 
estant guardian. "The law," said the leading 
judges, "does not suppose any such person to 
exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." They 
were only recognised "for repression and 
punishment." Statutes framed to demoralise 
and debase the people, so as to make them for 
ever unfit for self-government, pursued the 
souls of the victims to the second and third 
generation. In this ferocious violence the 
law-makers were not moved by fanaticism. 
Their rapacity was not concerned with the 
religion of the Irish, but only with their prop- 
erty and industry. The conversion of a 
CathoHc was not greatly desired; so long as 
there were Papists the planters could secure 
their lands, and use them as slaves, "worse 
than negroes." Laws which would have 
sounded infamous if directed openly to the 
seizing of property, took on a sacred character 
as a religious effort to suppress false doctrine. 
One-fiftieth part of Ireland was all that was 
left to Irish Catholics, utterly excluded for 
ever from the inheritance of their fathers. 
"One single foot of land there is not left us," 
rose their lament, "no, not what one may 



174 IRISH NATIONALITY 

make his bed upon." "See all that are with- 
out a bed except the furze of the mountains, 
the bent of the curragh, and the bog-myrtle 
beneath their bodies. Under frost, under 
snow, under rain, under blasts of wind, with- 
out a morsel to eat but watercress, green grass, 
sorrel of the mountain, or clover of the hills. 
Och! my pity to see their nobles forsaken!" 
And yet, in spite of this success, the Anglo- 
Irish had made a bad bargain. Cut off from 
their fellow-countrymen, having renounced 
the right to have a country, the Protestant 
land-hunters were no more respected in 
England than in Ireland. The English 
parliament did with them as it chose. Their 
subjection tempted the commercial classes. 
To safeguard their own profits of commerce 
and industry English traders made statutes 
to annihilate Irish competition. They for- 
bade carrying of cattle or dairy stuff to Eng- 
land, they forbade trade in soap or candles; 
in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest 
kind; the increase of corn was checked; 
it was proposed to stop Irish fisheries. The 
wool which they might not use at home must 
be exported to England alone. They might 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 175 

not build ships. From old time Ireland had 
traded across the Gaulish sea: her ports had 
seen the first discoverers of America. But 
now all her great harbours to the west with 
its rising American trade were closed: no 
merchant ship crossing the Atlantic was 
allowed to load at an Irish port or to un- 
load. The abundance of harbours, once so 
full of commerce, were now, said Swift, "of 
no more use to us than a beautiful prospect 
to a man shut up in a dungeon." In 1720 all 
trade was at a stand, the country bare of 
money, "want and misery in every face." It 
was unfortunate. Englishmen said, that Ire- 
land had been by the act of God doomed to 
poverty — so isolated in geographical position, 
so lacking in industrial resources, inhabited by 
a people so indolent in tillage, and unfitted by 
their religion to work. Meanwhile they suc- 
cessfully pushed their own business in a coun- 
try which they allowed to make nothing for 
itself. Their manufacturers sent over yearly 
two millions of their goods, more than to any 
other country save their American colonies, 
and took the raw material of Ireland, while 
Irish workers were driven out on the hillsides 



176 IRISH NATIONALITY 

to starve. The planters' parliament looked 
on in barren helplessness. They had no 
nation behind them. They could lead no 
popular resistance. They had no call to 
public duty. And the English knew it well. 
Ministers heaped up humiliations; they 
quartered on Irish revenues all the pensioners 
that could not safely be proposed to a free 
parliament in England — the mistresses of 
successsive kings and their children, German 
relations of the Hanoverians, useful politi- 
cians covered by other names, a queen of 
Denmark banished for misconduct, a Sar- 
dinian ambassador under a false title, a 
trailing host of Englishmen — pensions stead- 
ily increasing from £30,000 to over £89,000. 
Some £600,000 was at last yearly sent over 
to England for absentees, pensions, govern- 
ment annuities, and the like. A parliament 
servile and tyrannical could not even pre- 
tend to urge on the government that its 
measures, as a patriot said, should sometimes 
"diverge towards public utility." It had 
abandoned all power save that of increasing 
the sorrows of the people. 

A double corruption was thus proceeding. 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 177 

The English parliament desired to make the 
Irish houses for ever unfit for self-govern- 
ment. The Irish parliament was seeking to 
perform the same office for the Irish people 
under it. The old race meanwhile, three- 
fourths of the dwellers in Ireland, were 
brought under consideration of the rulers 
only as objects of some new rigour or severity. 
Their cry was unheard by an absent and 
indifferent "conqueror," and the only reform 
the country ever knew was an increase in the 
army that maintained the alien rulers and 
protected their crimes. In neither parlia- 
ment had the Irish any voice. In courts 
where the law was administered by Protestant 
landlords and their agents, as magistrates, 
grand juries, bailiffs, lawyers, and the rest — 
"full of might and injustice, without a word 
for the Irish in the law," as an Irish poem 
said, who would not even write the Irish 
names, but scornfully cried after all of them 
Teig and Diarmuid — the ancient tongue of 
the people and their despised birth left them 
helpless. Once a chief justice in Tipperary 
conducted trials with fairness and humanity: 
"for about ten miles from Clonmel both sides 



178 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of the road were lined with men, women, and 
children, who, as he passed along, kneeled 
down and supplicated Heaven to bless him 
as their protector and guardian angel." 
The people poured from "this sod of misery" 
across the sea. In the service of France 
alone 450,000 Irish soldiers were reckoned 
to have died between 1691 and 1745. Un- 
counted thousands from north and south 
sailed to America. Irish Catholics went 
there in a constant stream from 1650 till 
1798. The Protestant settlers followed them 
in the eighteenth century. 

Like the kings of England, the parliament 
of the English aristocracy and commercial 
magnates had failed to exploit Ireland to 
their advantage. For a hundred years (1691- 
1782) they ruled the Irish people with the 
strictest severity that human ingenuity could 
devise. A "strong government," purely 
English, was given its opportunity — pro- 
longed, undisturbed, uncontrolled — to ad- 
vance "the king's service," the dependency 
of Ireland upon England, and "the comfort 
or security of any English in it." A multi- 
tude of statesmen put their hands to the 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 179 

work. Commercial men in England inspired 
the policy. English clergy were sent over to 
fill all the higher posts of the church, and 
were the chief leaders of the secular govern- 
ment. Such a power very rarely falls to the 
rulers in any country. And in the end there 
was no advantage to any party. Some astute 
individuals heaped up an ignoble wealth, 
but there was no profit to Ireland, to Eng- 
land, or to the Empire. The Irish people 
suffered a long agony unmatched, perhaps, 
in European history. Few of the Protestant 
country gentry had established their for- 
tunes; their subservience which debarred 
them from public duty, their privilege of 
calling in English soldiers to protect them 
from the results of every error or crime, had 
robbed them of any high intelligence in 
politics or science in their business of land 
management, and thus doubly impoverished 
them. England on her part had thrown into 
the sea from her dominion a greater wealth 
of talent, industry, and bravery than had 
ever been exiled from any country in the 
world: there was not a country in Europe, 
and not an occupation, where Irishmen were 



180 IRISH NATIONALITY 

not in the first rank — as field-marshals, 
admirals, ambassadors, prime ministers, 
scholars, physicians, merchants, founders of 
mining industries, soldiers, and labourers. 
In exchange for this an incompetent and 
inferior landed gentry was established in 
Ireland. Instead of profit for the govern- 
ment there was plain bankruptcy — "Eng- 
land," it was said, "must now either support 
this kingdom, or allow her the means of 
supporting herself." As for the Empire, 
the colonies had been flooded with the men 
that England had wronged. Even the Prot- 
estant exiles from Ulster went to America 
as "Sons of St. Patrick." "To shun per- 
secution and designed ruin" by the English 
government, Protestants and Catholics had 
gone, and their money, their arms, the fury 
of their wrath, were spent in organising 
the American War. Irishmen were at every 
meeting, every council, every battle. Their 
indignation was a white flame of revolt 
that consumed every fear and vacillation 
around it. That long, deep, and bitter 
experience bore down the temporisers, and 
sent out men trained in suffering to triumph 



RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 181 

over every adversity. Brigadier-General 
Owen Sullivan, born at Limerick during the 
siege, was publicly thanked by Washington 
and by the congress. Commodore John 
Barry, a Wexford man, "Father of the 
American Navy," was Washington's com- 
mander-in-chief of the naval forces of the 
States. Charles Thompson of Strabane was 
secretary of the Continental Congress. Eight 
Irishmen, passionate organisers of the revolt, 
signed the Declaration of Independence. 
After the war an Irishman prepared the 
Declaration for publication from Jefferson's 
rough draft; an Irishman's son first publicly 
read it; an Irishman first printed and pub- 
lished it. 

We have seen the uncontrolled rule of 
English kings and English Parliaments. 
Such was the end of their story. There 
was another experiment yet to be tried. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 

1691-1750 

It might have seemed impossible amid 
such complicated tyrannies to build up a 
united country. But the most ferocious 
laws could not wholly destroy the kindly 
influences of Ireland, the essential needs of 
men, nor the charities of human nature. 
There grew up too the union of common 
suffering. Once more the people of Ireland 
were being "brayed together in a mortar" 
to compact them into a single commonwealth. 

The Irish had never lost their power of 
absorbing new settlers in their country. 
The Cromwellians complained that thousands 
of the English who came over under Eliza- 
beth had "become one with the Irish as 
well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years 
later these Cromwellians planted on Irish 

182 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 183 

farms suffered themselves the same change; 
their children could not speak a word of 
English and became wholly Irish in religion 
and feeling. Seven years after the battle of 
the Boyne the same influence began to turn 
Irish the very soldiers of William. The 
civilisation, the piety, the charm of Irish life 
told as of old. In the country places, far 
from the government, kindly friendships 
grew up between neighbours, and Protest- 
ants by some device of goodwill would hide a 
Catholic from some atrocious penalty, would 
save his arms from being confiscated, or his 
children from being brought up as Protest- 
ants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with 
the people, and common interests grew up 
in the land where they lived together. 

The Irish had seen the fires of destruction 
pass over them, consuming the humanities 
of their law, the honour of their country, 
and the relics of their fathers: the cry of 
their lamentation, said an Italian in 1641, 
was more expressive than any music he had 
heard of the great masters of the continent. 
The penal days have left their traces. We 
may still see in hidden places of the woods 



184 IRISH NATIONALITY 

some cave or rock where the people gathered 
in secret to celebrate mass. There remain 
memorials of Irishmen, cast out of their 
lands, who to mark their final degradation 
had been driven to the livelihood which the 
new English held in the utmost contempt — 
the work of their hands; their dead bodies 
were carried to the ruined abbeys, and 
proudly laid in the roofless naves and chan- 
cels, under great sculptured slabs bearing 
the names of once noble families, and deeply 
carved with the instruments of the dead man's 
trade, a plough, the tools of a shoemaker 
or a carpenter or a mason. In a far church in 
Connemara by the Atlantic, a Burke raised 
in 1722 a scupltured tomb to the first of his 
race who had come to Connacht, the figure 
in coat of mail and conical helmet finely 
carved in limestone. Monuments lie heaped 
in Burris, looking out on the great ocean; 
and in all the sacred places of the Irish. By 
their industry and skill in the despised busi- 
ness of handicrafts and commerce the out- 
laws were fast winning most of the ready 
money of the country into their hands. 
It would be a noble achievement, said 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 185 

Swift, to abolish the Irish language, which 
prevented "the Irish from being tamed." 
But Swift's popularity with the native Irish 
was remarkable, and when he visited Cavan 
he was interested by verses of its poets and 
wrote an English ballad founded on the 
Plearaca Ui Ruaire; he helped the rector 
of Anna (Belturbet) in his endeavours to 
have prayers read in Irish in the established 
churches in remote places. The Protestant 
bishops and clergy in general, holding that 
their first duty was not to minister to the 
souls of Irishmen, but rather as agents of 
the government to bring Irish speech "into 
entire disuse," refused to learn the only 
language understood by the people. Clergy 
and officials alike knew nothing whatever 
of the true life of Ireland. Now and then 
there was a rare exception, and the respect 
which Philip Skelton showed for the religious 
convictions of a country-bred maidservant 
should be remembered. But in general the 
clergy and all other political agents opposed 
kindly intercourse of the two races. The 
fiction of complete Irish barbarism was 
necessary to maintain the Protestant ascend- 



186 IRISH NATIONALITY 

ency, and in later days to defend it. The 
whole literature of the Irish was therefore 
cast aside as waste refuse. Their race is 
never mentioned in histories of the eighteenth 
century save as an indistinct and obscure 
mass of wretchedness, lawlessness, and igno- 
rance, lying in impenetrable darkness, whence 
no voice ever arose even of protest or com- 
plaint, unless the pains of starvation now and 
again woke the most miserable from their 
torpor to some wild outrage, to be repressed 
by even more savage severity. So fixed and 
convenient did this lying doctrine prove that 
it became a truism never challenged. To 
this day all manuscripts of the later Irish 
times have been rejected from purchase by 
public funds, to the irrevocable loss of a vast 
mass of Irish material. By steadily neglect- 
ing everything written in the native tongue 
of the country, the Protestant planters, one- 
fourth of the inhabitants, secured to them- 
selves the sole place in the later history of 
Ireland. A false history engendered a false 
policy, which in the long run held no profit 
for the Empire, England, or Ireland. 

Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 187 

tradition was carried across the years of 
captivity by these exiles in their own land. 
Descendants of literary clans, historians and 
poets and scribes were to be found in farm- 
houses, working at the plough and spade. 
Some wrote prose accounts of the late wars, 
the history of their tribe, the antiquities of 
their province, annals of Ireland, and geog- 
raphy. The greatest of the poets was Daibhi 
O'Bruadair of Limerick, a man knowing some 
English and learned in Irish lore, whose poems 
(1650-1694) stirred men of the cabins with 
lessons of their time, the laying down of arms 
by the Irish in 1652, Sarsfield and Limerick, 
the breaking of the treaty, the grandsons of 
kings working with the spade, the poor man 
perfected in learning, steadfast, well proved 
in good sense, the chaffering insolence of the 
new traders, the fashion of men fettering 
their tongues to speak the mere ghost of 
rough English, or turning Protestant for 
ease. Learned men showed the love of their 
language in the making of dictionaries and 
grammars to preserve, now that the great 
schools were broken up, the learning of the 
great masters of Irish. Thus the poet Tadhg 



188 IRISH NATIONALITY 

O'Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at 
a dictionary. Another learned poet and 
lexicographer, Aodh Buidh MacCurtin, pub- 
lished with Conor O'Begly in Paris a grammar 
(1728) and a dictionary (1732); in his last 
edition of the grammar he prayed pardon 
for "confounding an example of the impera- 
tive with the potential mood," which he was 
caused to do "by the great bother of the 
brawling company that is round about me 
in this prison." There were still well-qualified 
scribes who copied the old heroic stories and 
circulated them freely all over Ireland. There 
were some who translated religious books 
from French and Latin into Irish. "I wish 
to save," said Charles O 'Conor, "as many as 
I can of the ancient manuscripts of Ireland 
from the wreck which has overwhelmed every- 
thing that once belonged to us." O'Conor 
was of Sligo county. His father, like other 
gentlemen, had been so reduced by con- 
fiscation that he had to plough with his own 
hands. A Franciscan sheltered in a peasant's 
cottage, who knew no English, taught him 
Latin. He attended mass held secretly in 
a cave. Amid sucli difficulties he gained the 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 189 

best learning of his unhappy time. Much 
of the materials that O'Clery had used for 
his Annals had perished in the great troubles, 
and O'Conor began again that endless labour 
of Irish scholars, the saving of the relics of 
his people's story from final oblivion. It was 
the passion of his life. He formed an Irish 
library, and copied with his own hand large 
volumes of extracts from books he could not 
possess. Having obtained O'Clery's own 
manuscript of the Annals, he had this im- 
mense work copied by his own scribe; and 
another copy made in 1734 by Hugh O'Mul- 
loy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. 
O'Fergus of Dublin. He wrote for the learned, 
and delighted the peasants round him with 
the stories of their national history. It is 
interesting to recall that Goldsmith probably 
knew O 'Conor, so that the best English of an 
Irishman, and the best learning of an Irish- 
man at that time, were thus connected. 

It was the Irish antiquarians and his- 
torians who in 1759 drew Irishmen together 
into "the Catholic Committee" — Charles 
O'Conor, Dr. Curry, and Wyse of Water- 
ford. O'Conor by his learning preserved 



190 IRISH NATIONALITY 

for them the history of their fathers. Dr. 
Curry, of a Cavan family whose estates had 
been swept from them in 1641 and 1691, had 
studied as a physician in France, and was 
eminent in Dublin though shut out from 
every post; he was the first to use his re- 
search and literary powers to bring truth 
out of falsehood in the later Irish history, 
and to justify the Irish against the lying 
accusations concerning the rising of 1641. 
These learned patriots combined in a move- 
ment to win for the Irish some recognition 
before the law and some rights of citizens 
in their own land. 

Countless poets, meanwhile, poured out in 
verse the infinite sorrow of the Gaels, recalling 
the days when their land was filled with poet- 
schools and festivals, and the high hospitahty 
of great Irishmen. If a song of hope arose 
that the race should come to their own again, 
the voice of Irish charity was not wanting — 
"Having the fear of God, be ye full of alms- 
giving and friendliness, and forgetting no- 
thing do ye according to the commandments, 
shun ye drunkenness and oaths and cursing, 
and do not say till death 'God damn' from 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 191 

your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in 
some; they were all, in fact, professional wits 
— chief among them Eoghan Ruadh 0' Sulli- 
van from Kerry, who died in 1784; a working 
man who had laboured with plough and 
spade, and first came into note for helping 
his employer's son, fresh from a French 
college, with an explanation of a Greek 
passage. Jacobite poems told of the Lady 
Erin as a beautiful woman flying from the 
insults of foreign suitors in search of her 
real mate — poems of fancy, for the Stuarts 
had lost all hold on Ireland. The spirit of 
the north rang out in a multitude of bards, 
whose works perished in a century of per- 
secution and destruction. Among exiles in 
Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradi- 
tion lived on the lips of the peasants, who 
recited in their cabins the love-songs and re- 
ligious poems of long centuries past. The 
people in the bareness of their poverty were 
nourished with a literature full of wit, imagi- 
nation, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest 
hovels there were men skilled in a fine recita- 
tion. Their common language showed the 
literary influence, and Irish peasants even in 



192 IRISH NATIONALITY 

our own day have used a vocabulary of some 
five thousand words, as against about eight 
hundred words used by peasants in England. 
Even the village dancing at the cross-roads 
preserved a fine and skilled tradition. 

Families, too, still tried to have "a scholar" 
in their house, for the old learning's sake. 
Children shut out from all means of edu- 
cation might be seen learning their letters 
by copying with chalk the inscriptions on 
their fathers' tombstones. There were few 
candles, and the scholar read his books by a 
cabin fire in the light given by throwing upon 
it twigs and dried furze. Manuscripts were 
carefully treasured, and in days when it was 
death or ruin to be found with an Irish book 
they were buried in the ground or hidden 
in the walls. In remote places schools were 
maintained out of the destitution of the 
poor; like that one which was kept up for over 
a hundred years in county Waterford, where 
the people of the surrounding districts sup- 
ported "poor scholars" free of charge. 
There were some in Kerry, some in Clare, 
where a very remarkable group of poets 
sprang up. From all parts of Ireland students 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 193 

begged their way to "the schools of Munster." 
Thus Greek and Latin still found their way 
into the labourer's cottage. In county Cork, 
John Clairech O'Donnell, in remembrance of 
the ancient assembhes of the bards of all 
Ireland, gathered to his house poets and 
learned men to recite and contend as in the 
old days. Famous as a poet, he wrote part 
of a history of Ireland, and projected a trans- 
lation of Homer into Irish. But he worked 
in peril, flying for his life more than once 
before the bard-hunters; in his denunciations 
the English oppressor stands before us — 
plentiful his costly living in the high-gabled 
lighted-up mansion of the Irish Brian, but 
tight-closed his door, and his churlishness 
shut up inside with him, there in an opening 
between two mountains, until famine clove 
to the people and bowed them to his will; 
his gate he never opened to the moan of the 
starving, "and oh! may heaven of the saints 
be a red wilderness for James Dawson!" 

The enthusiasm of the Irish touched some 
of the planters. A hereditary chronicler of 
the O'Briens who published in 1717 a vindi- 
cation of the Antiquities of Ireland got two 



194 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Jiuiidred and thirty-eight subscribers, divided 
about equally between English and Gaelic 
names. Wandering poets sang, as Irish poets 
had done nine hundred years before, even in 
the houses of the strangers, and found in 
some of them a kindly friend. O'Carolan, 
the harper and singer, was beloved by both 
races. A slight inequality in a village field 
in Meath still after a hundred and fifty 
years recalls to Irish peasants the site of the 
house where he was born, and at his death 
English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, 
gathered in an encampment of tents to do 
honour to his name. The magic of Irish 
music seems even to have stirred in the 
landlords' parliament some dim sense of a 
national boast. An English nobleman com- 
ing to the parliament with a Welsh harper 
claimed that in all Ireland no such music 
could be heard. Mr. Jones of Leitrim took 
up the challenge for an Irishman of his county 
who "had never worn linen or woollen." 
The Commons begged to have the trial in 
their House before business began, and all 
assembled to greet the Leitrim champion. 
O'Duibhgeanain was of an old literary clan: 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 195 

one of them had shared in making the Annals 
of the Four Masters; he himself was not only 
a fine harper, but an excellent Greek and 
Latin scholar. He came, tall and handsome, 
looking very noble in his ancient garb made 
of beaten rushes, with a cloak or plaid of the 
same stuff, and a high conical cap of the same 
adorned with many tassels. And the House 
of Commons gave him their verdict. 

James Murphy, a poor bricklayer of Cork, 
who became an architect and studied Arabian 
antiquities in Portugal and Spain, gives the 
lament of Irish scholars. "You accuse their 
pastors with illiterature, whilst you adopt the 
most cruel means of making them ignorant; 
and their peasantry with untractableness, 
whilst you deprive them of the means of 
civilisation. But that is not all; you have 
deprived them at once of their religion, their 
liberty, their oak, and their harp, and left 
them to deplore their fate, not in the strains 
of their ancestors, but in the sighs of oppres- 
sion." To the great landlords the Act of 
1691 which had given them wealth was the 
dawn of Irish civilisation. Oblivion might 
cover all the rest, all that was not theirs. 



196 IRISH NATIONALITY 

They lived in a land some few years old, 
not more than a man's age might cover. 

By degrees, however, dwellers in Ireland 
were forced into some concern for its fortunes. 
Swift showed to the Protestants the wrongs 
they endured and the liberties which should 
be theirs, and flung his scorn on the shameful 
system of their slavery and their tyranny 
(1724). Lord Molesworth urged (1723) free- 
dom of religion, schools of husbandry, relief 
of the poor from their intolerable burdens, 
the making parliament into a really represen- 
tative body. Bishop Berkeley wrote his 
famous Querist — the most searching study of 
the people's grief and its remedies. 

Gradually the people of Ireland were being 
drawn together. All classes suffered under 
the laws to abolish Irish trade and industry. 
Human charities were strong in men of both 
sides, and in the country there was a grow- 
ing movement to unite the more liberal of 
the landowners, the Dissenters of the north, 
and the Catholics, in a common citizenship. 
It had proved inpossible to carry out fully 
the penal code. No life could have gone on 
under its monstrous terms. There were not 



RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 197 

Protestants enough to carry on all the busi- 
ness of the country and some "Papists" had 
to be taken at least into the humbler forms 
of official work. Friendly acts between 
neighbours diminished persecution. 

"Let the legislature befriend us now, and 
we are theirs forever," was the cry of the 
Munster peasantry, organised under O'Dris- 
coU, to the Protestant parliament in 1786. 

Such a movement alarmed the government 
extremely. If, they said, religious distinc- 
tions were abolished, the Protestants would 
find themselves secure of their position 
without British protection, and might they 
not then form a government more to the 
taste and wishes of the people — in fact, might 
not a nation begin again to live in Ireland. 

The whole energy of the government was 
therefore called out to avert the rise of a 
united Irish People. 



CHAPTER XII 

AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 
1750-1800 

The movement of conciliation of its peoples 
that was shaping a new Ireland, silent and 
unrecorded as it was, can only be understood 
by the astonishing history of the next fifty 
years, when the spirit of a nation rose again 
triumphant, and lesser passions fell before 
the love of country. 

The Protestant gentry, who alone had free 
entry into public life, were of necessity the 
chief actors in the recorded story. But in 
the awakening country they had to reckon 
with a risingp ower in the Catholic Irish. 
Dr. Lucas, who in 1741 had begun to stir for 
reform and freedom, had stirred not only 
the English settlers but the native Irish. 
Idolised by the Irish people, he raised in his 
Citizens' Journal a new national protest. 
The pamphlet war which followed — where 

198 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 199 

men argued not only on free trade and govern- 
ment, but on Ireland itself, on its old and new 
races, on its Irish barbarism, said some, its 
Irish civilisation, said others — spread the 
idea of a common history of Ireland in which 
all its inhabitants were concerned. In 
parliament too, though Catholics were shut 
out, yet men of old Irish race were to be 
found — men of Catholic families who had 
accepted Protestantism as a means of enter- 
ing public life, chiefly by way of the law. They 
had not, save very rarely, put off their 
patriotic ardour with their old religion; of 
the middle class, they were braver in their 
outlook than the small and disheartened 
Catholic aristocracy. If their numbers were 
few their ability was great, and behind them 
lay that vast mass of their own people whose 
blood they shared. 

It was an Irishman who first roused the 
House of Commons to remember that they had 
a country of their own and an "Irish interest" 
— Antony Malone. This astonishing orator 
and parliamentarian invented a patriotic op- 
position (1753). A great sea in a "storm" 
men said of him. Terror was immediately 



200 IRISH NATIONALITY 

excited at his Irish origin and his national 
feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might 
mean emancipation from the English legis- 
lature, and in truth the constitutional de- 
pendency upon England was the object upon 
which Malone's eye was constantly fixed. 
He raised again the protest of Molyneux for 
a free parliament and constitution. He 
stirred "the whole nation" for "the last 
struggle for Ireland." They and their chil- 
dren would be slaves, he said, if they yielded 
to the claim of the government that the 
English privy council could alter the money 
bills sent over by the Irish parliament, or 
that the king had the right to apply at his 
will the surplus funds in the treasury. 

Malone was defeated, but the battle had 
begun which in thirty years was to give to 
Ireland her first hopes of freedom. A fresh 
current of thought poured through the House 
— free trade, free religion, a Habeas Corpus 
Act, fewer pensions for Englishmen, a share 
in law and government for Irishmen, security 
for judges, and a parliament elected every 
seven years. Successors of Malone appeared 
in the House of Commons in 1761 — more 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 201 

lawyers, men said, than any one living 
could remember, or "than appears in any 
history in this or any other kingdom upon 
earth." They depended, not on confiscation, 
but on their own abilities; they owed nothing 
to government, which gave all the great posts 
of the bar to Englishmen. Some freedom of 
soul was theirs, and manhood for the long 
struggle. In 1765 the issue was clearly set. 
The English House of Commons which had 
passed the Stamp Act for the American 
colonies, argued that it had the right to tax 
Ireland without her consent; and English 
lawyers laid down the absolute power of 
parliament to bind Ireland by its laws. In 
Ireland Lord Charlemont and some other 
peers declared that Ireland was a distinct 
kingdom, with its own legislature and execu- 
tive under the king. 

In that same year the patriots demanded 
that elections should be held every seven 
years — the first step in Ireland towards a 
true representation, and the first blow to the 
dominion of an aristocracy. The English 
government dealt its counter-stroke. The 
viceroy was ordered to reside in Dublin, and 



202 IRISH' NATIONALITY 

by making himself the source of all favours, 
the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate 
political influence in the English Crown. A 
system of bribery began beyond all previous 
dreams; peerages were made by the score; 
and the first national debt of nearly two 
millions created in less than thirty years. 
The landowners who controlled the seats in 
the Commons were reminded that "they held 
by Great Britain everything most dear to 
them, their religion, their pre-eminence, their 
property, their political power"; that "con- 
fiscation is their common title." "The king's 
business," as the government understood it, 
lay in "procuring the supplies which the 
English minister thought fit to ask, and 
preventing the parliament from examining 
into the account of previous years." 

Meanwhile misery deepened. In 1778 
thirty thousand Irishmen were seeking their 
living on the continent, besides the vast 
numbers flying to America. "The wretches 
that remained had scarcely the appearance 
of human creatures." English exports to 
Ireland sank by half-a-million, and England 
instead of receiving money had to send 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 203 

£50,000 for the payment of troops there. 
Other dangers had arisen. George Washing- 
ton was made commander-in-chief of the 
forces for the American war in 1775, and in 
1778 France recognised American independ- 
ence. The shores of Ireland lay open to at- 
tack: the country was drained of troops. 
Bands of volunteers were formed for its pro- 
tection, Protestant troops led by landlords 
and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were 
enrolled (1779). Ireland was no longer un- 
armed. What was even more important, she 
was no longer unrepresented. A packed 
parliament that had obscured the true desires 
of the country was silenced before the voice 
of the people. In the sense of a common 
duty, landlord and tenant, Protestant and 
Catholic, were joined; the spirit of tolerance 
and nationality that had been spreading 
through the country was openly manifested. 
In those times of hope and terror men's 
minds on both sides moved quickly. The 
collapse of the English system was rapid; the 
government saw the failure of their army 
plans with the refusal of the Irish to give any 
more military grants; the failure of their 



204 IRISH NATIONALITY 

gains from the Irish treasury in the near bank- 
ruptcy of the Irish state, with the burden of 
its upkeep thrown on England; the failure of 
the prodigious corruption and buying of the 
souls of men before the new spirit that swept 
through the island, the spirit of a nation. 
"England has sown her laws in dragons' 
teeth, and they have sprung up in armed 
men," cried Hussey Burgh, a worthy Irish 
successor of Malone in the House of Com- 
mons. "It is no longer the parliament of 
Ireland that is to be managed or attended to," 
wrote the lord-lieutenant. "It is the whole of 
this country." Above all, the war with the 
colonies brought home to them Grattan's 
prophecy — "what you trample on in Europe 
will sting you in America." 

The country, through the Volunteers, re- 
quired four main reforms. They asked for 
justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas 
Corpus Act should be restored, and independ- 
ent judges no longer hold their places at 
pleasure. They asked that the English com- 
mercial laws which had ruined Irish industry 
and sunk the land in poverty and idleness 
should be abandoned; taught by a long 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 205 

misery. Irishmen agreed to buy no manu- 
factures but the work of Irish hands, and 
Dublin men compelled members to swear 
that they should vote for "the good of Ire- 
land," a new phrase in politics. A third 
demand was that the penal laws which 
divided and broke the strength of Ireland 
should cease. "The Irish Protestant," cried 
Grattan, "could never be free till the Irish 
Catholic had ceased to be a slave." "You 
are now," said Burke, "beginning to have a 
country." Finally a great cry for the in- 
dependence of their parliament rose in every 
county and from every class. 

The demands for the justice of free men, 
for free trade, free religion, a free nation, 
were carried by the popular passion into the 
parliaments of Dublin and London. In three 
years the Dublin parliament had freed Pro- 
testant dissenters from the Test Act and had 
repealed the greater part of the penal code; 
the English commercial code had fallen to 
the ground; the Habeas Corpus Act was won. 
In 1780 Grattan proposed his resolutions 
declaring that while the two nations were 
inseparably bound together under one Crown, 



206 IRISH NATIONALITY 

the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland 
could alone make laws for Ireland. 

The claim for a free parliament ran through 
the country — "the epidemic madness," ex- 
claimed the viceroy. But the Irish had good 
reason for their madness. At the first stirring 
of the national movement in 1778 "artful 
politicians" in England had revived a scheme 
favourably viewed there — the abolition of 
an Irish parliament and the union of Ireland 
with England. "Do not make an union with 
us, sir," said Dr. Johnson to an Irishman in 
1779; "we should unite with you only to rob 
you." The threat of the disappearance of 
Ireland as a country quickened anxiety to 
restore its old parliament. The Irish knew 
too how precarious was all that they had 
gained. Lord North described all past con- 
cessions as "resumable at pleasure" by the 
power that granted them. 

In presence of these dangers the Volunteers 
called a convention of their body to meet in 
the church of Dungannon on Feb. 15, 1782 — to 
their mind no unfit place for their lofty work. 

"We know," they said, "our duty to 
our sovereign and our loyalty; we know our 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 207 

duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free." 
"As Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protest- 
ants," they rejoiced in the relaxation of penal 
laws and upheld the sacred rights of all to 
freedom of religion. A week later Grattan 
moved in the House of Commons an address 
to the king — that the people of this country 
are a free people; that the crown of Ireland 
is an imperial crown; and the kingdom of 
Ireland a distinct kingdom with a parlia- 
ment of her own, the sole legislature thereof. 
The battle opened by Molyneux a hundred 
years before was won. The Act of 1719, by 
which the English parliament had justified 
its usurpation of powers, was repealed (1782). 
"To set aside all doubts" another Act (1783) 
declared that the right of Ireland to be 
governed solely by the king and the parlia- 
ment of Ireland was now established and as- 
certained, and should never again be ques- 
tioned or questionable. 

On April 16, 1782, Grattan passed through 
the long ranks of Volunteers drawn up before 
the old Parliament House of Ireland, to 
proclaim the victory of his country. "I 
am now to address a free people. Ages have 



208 IRISH NATIONALITY 

passed away, and this is the first moment 
in which you could be distinguished by that 
appellation. . . . Ireland is now a nation. 
In that character I hail her, and bowing in 
her august presence, I say esto 'perpetual^' 
The first act of the emancipated parliament 
was to vote a grant for twenty thousand 
sailors for the English navy. 

That day of a nation's exultation and 
thanksgiving was brief. The restored parlia- 
ment entered into a gloomy inheritance — an 
authority which had been polluted and de- 
stroyed — an almost ruined country. The 
heritage of a tyranny prolonged through 
centuries was not to be got rid of rapidly. 
England gave to Ireland half a generation for 
the task. 

Since the days of Henry VIII the Irish 
parliaments had been shaped and compacted 
to give to England complete control. The 
system in this country, wrote the viceroy, did 
not bear the smallest resemblance to represen- 
tation. All bills had to go through the privy 
council, whose secret and overwhelming influ- 
ence was backed by the privy council in Eng- 
land, the English law officers, and finally the 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 209 

English cabinet. Irish proposals were re- 
jected not in parliament, but in these secret 
councils. The king had a veto in Ireland, 
not in England. The English cabinet, 
changing with English parties, had the last 
word on every Irish bill. There was no Irish 
cabinet responsible to the Irish Houses: no 
ministry resigned, whatever the majority by 
which it was defeated. Nominally elected by 
about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the Com- 
mons did not represent even these. A land- 
lords' assembly, there was no Catholic in it, 
and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords 
were subdued to English interests : some hun- 
dred Englishmen, whose main property was 
in England but who commanded a number 
of votes for lands in Ireland, did constantly 
override the Irish landlords and drag them 
on in a policy far from serviceable to them. 
The landlords' men in the Commons were 
accustomed to vote as the Castle might direct. 
In the complete degradation of public life no 
humiliation or lack of public honour offended 
them. The number of placemen and pen- 
sioners equalled nearly one-half of the whole 
efficient body: "the price of a seat of parlia- 



210 IRISH NATIONALITY 

ment/' men said, "is as well ascertained as 
that of the cattle of the field." 

All these dangers might with time and pa- 
tience be overcome. An Irish body, on Irish 
soil, no matter what its constitution, could not 
remain aloof from the needs, and blind to the 
facts, of Ireland, like strangers in another land. 
The good- will of the people abounded; even 
the poorer farmers showed in a better dress, in 
cleanliness, in self-respect, how they had been 
stirred by the dream of freedom, the hope of 
a country. The connection with England, the 
dependence on the king, was fully accepted, 
and Ireland prepared to tax herself out of all 
proportion to her wealth for imperial purposes. 
The gentry were losing the fears that had pos- 
sessed them for their properties, and a fair 
hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, 
united, educated, and industrious. Volun- 
teers, disciplined, sober, and law-abiding, had 
shown the orderly forces of the country. 
Parliament had awakened to the care of 
Ireland as well as the benefit of England. 
In a few years it opened "the gates of opu- 
lence and knowledge." It abolished the 
cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 211 

union of all religions in a common citizenship. 
It showed admirable knowledge in the method 
of restoring prosperity to the country, awak- 
ening its industrial life, increasing tillage, 
and opening inland navigation. Time was 
needed to close the springs of corruption and 
to bring reform to the parliament itself. 

But the very success of parliament woke 
fears in England, and alarm in the autocratic 
government of Ireland. Jealous of power, 
ministers set themselves to restore by cor- 
ruption an absolute authority, and recover by 
bribery the prerogative that had been lost. 

The first danger appeared in 1785, in the 
commercial negotiations with England. To 
crush the woollen trade England had put 
duties of over £2 a yard on a certain cloth 
carried from Ireland to England, which paid 
5^d. if brought from England to Ireland; and 
so on for other goods. Irish shipping had been 
reduced to less than a third of that of Liver- 
pool alone. Pitt's proposal of free trade 
between the countries was accepted by Ire- 
land (1785), but a storm of wrath swept over 
the British world of business; they refused 
Pitt's explanation that an Ireland where all 



212 IRISH NATIONALITY 

industries had been killed could not compete 
against the industrial pre-eminence of Eng- 
land; and prepared a new scheme which re- 
established the ascendency of the British par- 
liament over Irish navigation and commerce. 
This was rejected in Ireland as fatal to their 
Constitution. Twice again the Irish parliament 
attempted a commercial agreement between 
the two countries : twice the Irish government 
refused to give it place; a few years later the 
same ministers urged the Union on the ground 
that no such commercial arrangement existed. 
The advantages which England possessed and 
should maintain were explained by the vice- 
roy to Pitt in 1792. "Is not the very essence 
of your imperial policy to prevent the interest 
of Ireland clashing and interfering with the 
interest of England.^ . . . Have you not 
crushed her in every point that would inter- 
fere with British interest or monopoly by 
means of her parliament for the last century, 
till lately.^ . . . You know the advantages 
you reap from Ireland. . *. . In return does 
she cost you one farthing (except the linen 
monopoly) .f^ Do you employ a soldier on 
her account she does not pay, or a single ship 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 213 

more for the protection of the British com- 
merce than if she was at the bottom of the 
sea?" 

The Catholic question also awakened the 
Castle fears. The penal laws had failed to 
diminish the "Papists": at the then rate of 
conversion it would take four thousand years 
to turn the people into Protestants. A 
nobler idea had arisen throughout Ireland. 
"The question is now," Grattan said, 
"whether we shall be a Protestant settlement 
or an Irish nation . . . for so long as we 
exclude Catholics from natural liberty and 
the common rights of man we are not a 
people." Nothing could be more unwelcome 
to the government. A real union between 
religious bodies in Ireland, they said, would 
induce Irish statesmen to regulate their 
policy mainly by the public opinion of their 
own country. To avert this danger they 
put forth all their strength. "The present 
frame of Irish government is particularly 
well calculated for our purpose. That 
frame is a Protestant garrison in possession 
of the land, magistracy, and power of the 
country; holding that property under the 



214 IRISH NATIONALITY 

tenure of British power and supremacy, and 
ready at every instant to crush the rising of 
the conquered." 

Finally the pressing question of reform, 
passionately demanded by Protestant and 
Catholic for fifteen years, was resisted by 
the whole might of the Castle. ''If," wrote 
the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her govern" 
ment became more open and more attentive 
to the feelings of the Irish nation, the diffi- 
culty of management had increased, is that 
a reason for opening the government and 
making the parliament more subservient to 
the feelings of the nation at large?" 

To the misfortune both of Ireland and of 
England the Irish government through these 
years was led by one of the darkest influences 
known in the evil counsels of its history — the 
chancellor Fitzgibbon, rewarded by England 
with the title Earl of Clare. Unchecked by 
criticism, secret in machinations, brutal in 
speech, and violent in authority, he had 
known the use of every evil power that still 
remained as a legacy from the past. By 
working on the ignorance of the cabinet in 
London and on the alarms and corruptions 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 215 

of Ireland, by using all the secret powers left 
in his hands through the privy council, by a 
system of unexampled bribery, he succeeded 
in paralysing the constitution which it was 
his business to maintain, and destroying the 
parliamentary rights which had been nom- 
inally conceded. The voice of the nation 
was silenced by the forbidding of all con- 
ventions. In the re-established "frame of 
government" Fitzgibbon was all-powerful. 
The only English viceroy who resisted him. 
Lord Fitzwilliam, was recalled amid the 
acclamations and lamentations of Ireland — 
all others yielded to his force. Government 
in his hands was the enemy of the people, 
parliament a mockery, constitutional move- 
ments mere vanity. Law appeared only as 
an instrument of oppression; the Catholic 
Irish were put out of its protection, the 
government agents out of its control. The 
country gentry were alienated and demoral- 
ised — left to waste with "their inert property 
and their inert talents." Every reform was 
refused which might have allayed the fears 
of the people. Religious war was secretly 
stirred up by the agents of the government 
and in its interest, setting one part of the coun- 



216 IRISH NATIONALITY 

try to exterminate the other. Distrust and 
suspicion, arrogance and fear, with their 
train of calamities for the next hundred 
years distracted the island. 

A system of absolute power, maintained 
by coercion, woke the deep passion of the 
country. Despair of the constitution made 
men turn to republicanism and agitation in 
arms. The violent repression of freedom was 
used at a time when the progress of the 
human mind had been prodigious, when on 
all sides men were drinking in the lessons of 
popular liberties from the republics of Amer- 
ica and France. The system of rule inaugu- 
rated by Fitzgibbon could have only one end 
= — the revolt of a maddened people. Warnings 
and entreaties poured in to the Castle. To 
the very last the gentry pleaded for reform 
to reassure men drifting in their despair into 
plots of armed republicanism. Every meas- 
ure to relieve their fears was denied, every 
measure to heighten them was pursued. 
Violent statesmen in the Castle, and officers 
of their troops, did not fear to express their 
sense that a rebellion would enable them to 
make an end of the discontented once for all, 
and of the Irish Constitution. The rising 



AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 217 

was, in fact, at last forced by the horrors 
which were openly encouraged by the govern- 
ment in 1796-7. ^ "Every crime, every 
cruelty, that could be committed by Cos- 
sacks or Calmucks has been transacted here," 
said General Abercromby, sent in 1797 as 
commander-in-chief. He refused the bar- 
barities of martial rule when, as he said, the 
government's orders might be carried over 
the whole kingdom by an orderly dragoon, 
or a writ executed without any difficulty, a 
few places in the mountains excepted; and 
demanded the maintenance of law. "The 
abuses of all kinds I found here can scarcely 
be believed or enumerated." "He must have 
lost his senses," wrote Clare of the great 
soldier, and "this Scotch beast," as he called 
him, was forced out of the country as Lord 
Fitzwilliam had been. Abercromby was 
succeeded by General Lake, who had already 
shown the ferocity of his temper in his com- 
mand in Ulster, and in a month the rebellion 
broke out. 

That appalling tale of terror, despair, and 
cruelty cannot be told in all its horror. The 
people, scared into scattered risings, refused 



218 IRISH NATIONALITY 

protection when their arms were given up, 
or terms if they surrendered, were without 
hope; the "pacification" of the government 
set no hmits to atrocities, and the cry of the 
tortured rose unceasingly day and night. 

The suppression of the rebeUion burned 
into the Irish heart the behef that the Eng- 
lish government was their implacable enemy, 
that the law was their oppressor, and Eng- 
lishmen the haters of their race. The treat- 
ment of later years has not yet wiped out of 
memory that horror. The dark fear that 
during the rebellion stood over the Irish 
peasant in his cabin has been used to illus- 
trate his credulity and his brutishness. The 
government cannot be excused by that same 
plea of fear. Clare no doubt held the doc- 
trine of many English governors before him, 
that Ireland could only be kept bound to 
England by the ruin of its parliament and 
the corruption of its gentry, the perpetual 
animosity of its races, and the enslavement 
of its people. But even in his own day there 
were men who believed in a nobler states- 
manship — in a union of the nations in equal 
honour and liberties. 



CHAPTER XIII 

IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 

1800-1900 

The horror of death lay over Ireland; 
cruelty and terror raised to a frenzy; govern- 
ment by martial law; a huge army occupy- 
ing the country. In that dark time the plan 
for the Union with England, secretly pre- 
pared in London, was announced to the 
Irish parliament. 

It seemed that England had everything to 
gain by a union. There was one objection. 
Chatham had feared that a hundred Irishmen 
would strengthen the democratic side of the 
English parliament; others that their elo- 
quence would lengthen and perhaps confuse 
debates. But it was held that a hundred 
members would be lost in the British parlia- 
ment, and that Irish doctrines would be sunk 

in the sea of British common sense. 

219 



220 IRISH NATIONALITY 

In Ireland a union was detested as a con- 
spiracy against its liberties. The parliament 
at once rejected it; no parliament, it was 
urged, had a right to pass an act destroying 
the constitution of Ireland, and handing over 
the dominion to another country, without 
asking consent of the nation. Pitt refused 
to have anything to say to this Jacobin 
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people — - 
a doctrine he would oppose wherever he 
encountered it. 

The Union, Pitt said, was no proposal to 
subject Ireland to a foreign yoke, but a 
volutnary association of two ^reat countries 
seeking their common benefit in one empire. 
There were progresses of the viceroy, visits 
of political agents, military warnings, threats 
of eviction, to induce petitions in its favour; 
all reforms were refused — the outrageous 
system of collecting tithes, the disabilities 
of Catholics — so as to keep something to 
bargain with; 137,000 armed men were 
assembled in Ireland. But amid the univer- 
sal detestation and execration of a Union the 
government dared not risk an election, and 
proceeded to pack the parliament privately. 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 221 

By official means the Commons were purged 
of sixty-three opponents, and safe men put 
in, some Englishmen, some staff-officers, men 
without a foot of land in Ireland. There 
were, contrary to one of the new laws, 
seventy-two place-holders and pensioners in 
the House. Fifty-four peerages were given 
to buy consciences. The borough-holders 
were offered li millions to console them for 
loss in sale of seats. There was a host of 
minor pensions. Threats and disgrace were 
used to others. Large sums were sent from 
London to bribe the Press, and corrupt the 
wavering with ready money. Pitt pledged 
himself to emancipation. 

Thus in 1800, at the point of the sword, 
and amid many adjurations to speed from 
England, the Act of Union was forced through 
the most corrupt parliament ever created by 
a government: it was said that only seven 
of the majority were unbribed. An Act 
"formed in the British cabinet, unsolicited 
by the Irish nation," "passed in the middle 
of war, in the centre of a tremendous mili- 
tary force, under the influence of immediate 
personal danger," was followed, as wise men 



222 IRISH NATIONALITY 

had warned, by generations of strife. A 
hundred years of ceaseless agitation, from 
the first tragedy of Robert Emmet's abortive 
rising in 1803, proclaimed the undying oppo- 
sition of Irishmen to a Union that from the 
fiirst lacked all moral sanction. 

An English parliament, all intermediate 
power being destroyed, was now confronted 
with the Irish people. Of that people it 
knew nothing, of its national spirit, its 
conception of government or social life. The 
history and literature which might reveal 
the mind of the nation is so neglected that 
to this day there is no means for its study 
in the Imperial University, nor the capital 
of Empire. The Times perceived in "the 
Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." 
Peel in his ignorance thought Irishmen had 
good qualities except for "a general con- 
federacy in crime ... a settled and uni- 
form system of guilt, accompanied by horrible 
and monstrous perjuries such as could not 
be found in any civilised country." 

Promises were lavished to commend the 
Union. Ministers assured Ireland of less 
expenditure and lighter taxation: with vast 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 223 

commerce and manufactures, a rise in the 
value of land, and a stream of English capital 
and industry. All contests being referred 
from the island to Great Britain — to a body 
not like the Irish influenced by prejudices 
and passions — Ireland would for the first 
time arrive at national union. The passing 
over to London of the chief part of Irish 
intelligence and wealth would give to Ire- 
land "a power over the executive and general 
policy of the Empire which would far more 
than compensate her"; and would, in fact, 
lead to such a union of hearts that presently 
it would not matter, Pitt hoped, whether 
members for Ireland were elected in Ireland 
or in England. Ireland would also be 
placed in "a natural situation," for by 
union with the Empire she would have four- 
teen to three in favour of her Protestant 
establishment, instead of three to one against 
it as happened in the country itself; so that 
Protestant ascendency would be for ever 
assured. The Catholics, however, would find 
in the pure and serene air of the English 
legislature impartial kindness, and the poor 
might hope for relief from tithes and the need 



224 IRISH NATIONALITY 

of supporting their clergy. All Irish finan- 
ciers and patriots contended that the fair 
words were deceptive, and that the Union 
must bring to Ireland immeasurable disaster. 

Any discussion of the Union in its effect 
on Ireland lies apart from a discussion of the 
motives of men who administered the system 
in the last century. The system itself, 
wrongly conceived and wrongly enforced, 
contained the principles of ruin, and no good 
motives could make it work for the benefit 
of Ireland, or, in the long run, of England. 

Oppressive financial burdens were laid on 
the Irish. Each country was for the next 
twenty years to provide for its own expendi- 
ture and debt, and to contribute a sum to 
the general expenses of the United Kingdom, 
fixed in the proportion of seven and a half 
parts for Great Britain and one part for 
Ireland. The debt of Ireland had formerly 
been small; in 1793 it was 234 millions; it 
had risen to nearly 28 millions by 1801, in 
great measure through the charges of Clare's 
policy of martial law and bribery. In the 
next years heavy loans were required for the 
Napoleonic war. When Ireland, exhausted 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 2^5 

by calamity, was unable to pay, loans were 
raised in England at heavy war-rates and 
charged to the public debt of Ireland. In 
1817 the Irish debt had increased more than 
fourfold, to nearly 113 milHons. No record 
was made in the books of the Exchequer as to 
what portion of the vast sums raised should in 
fairness be allotted to Ireland; there is no 
proof that there was any accuracy in the 
apportionment. The promised lighter taxa- 
tion ended in a near bankruptcy, and the 
approach of an appalling famine in 1817. 
Bankruptcy was avoided by uniting the two 
treasuries to form one national debt — but 
the burden of Ireland remained as oppressive 
as before. Meanwhile the effect of the Union 
had been to depress all Irish industries and 
resources, and in these sixteen years the 
comparative wealth of Ireland had fallen, 
and the taxes had risen far beyond the rise in 
England. The people sank yet deeper under 
their heavy load. The result of their incapac- 
ity to pay the amount fixed at the Union was, 
that of all the taxes collected from them for 
the next fifty-three years, one-third was spent 
in Ireland, and two-thirds were absorbed 



226 IRISH NATIONALITY 

by England; from 1817 to 1870 the cost of 
government in Ireland was under 100 millions, 
while the contributions to the imperial exche- 
quer were 210 millions, so that Ireland sent 
to England more than twice as much as was 
spent on her. The tribute from Ireland to 
England in the last ninety-three years, over 
and above the cost of Irish administration, 
has been over 325 millions — a sum which 
would probably be much increased by a more 
exact method both of recording the revenue 
collected from Ireland and the "local" and 
"imperial" charges, so as to give the full Irish 
revenue, and to prevent the debiting to Ire- 
land of charges for which she was not really 
liable. While this heavy ransom was exacted 
Ireland was represented as a beggar, never 
satisfied, at the gates of England. 

Later, in 1852, Gladstone began to carry 
out the second part of the Union scheme, 
the indiscriminate taxation of the two coun- 
tries. In a few years he added two and a 
half millions to Irish taxation, at a moment 
when the country, devastated by famine, 
was sinking under the loss of its corn trade 
through the English law, and wasting away 



• IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 227 

by emigration to half its former population. 
In 1896 a* Financial Commission reported 
that the Act of Union had laid on Ireland a 
burden she was unable to bear; and that, in 
spite of the Union pledge that the ability of 
Ireland to pay should always be taken into 
account, she was paying one-eleventh of the 
tax revenue of the United Kingdom while 
her taxable capacity was one-twentieth or 
less. While Great Britain paid less than 
two shillings in every pound of her taxable 
surplus, Ireland paid about ten shillings 
in every pound of hers. No relief was 
given. 

Under this drain of her wealth the poverty 
or Ireland was intensified, material progress 
was impossible, and one bad season was 
enough to produce wide distress, and two 
a state of famine. Meanwhile, the cost 
of administration was wasteful and lavish, 
fixed on the high prices of the English scale, 
and vastly more expensive than the cost of 
a government founded on domestic support 
and acceptable to the people. The doom of 
an exhausting poverty was laid on Ireland 
by a rich and extravagant partner, who fixed 



228 IRISH NATIONALITY 

the expenses for English purposes, called for 
the money, and kept the books. 

The Union intensified the alien temper 
of Irish government. We may remember 
the scandal caused lately by the phrase of 
a great Irish administrator that Ireland 
should be governed according to Irish ideas. 
Dublin Castle, no longer controlled by an 
Irish parliament, entrenched itself more 
firmly against the people. Some well-mean- 
ing governors went over to Ireland, but the 
omnipotent Castle machine broke their efforts 
for impartial rule or regard for the opinion 
of the country. The Protestant Ascendancy 
openly reminded the Castle that its very 
existence hung on the Orange associations. 
Arms were supplied free from Dublin to 
the Orangemen while all Catholics were 
disarmed. The jobbing of the grand juries 
to enrich themselves out of the poor — the 
traffic of magistrates who violated their duties 
and their oaths — these were unchanged. 
Justice was so far forgotten that the presiding 
judge at the trial of O' Council spoke of the 
counsel for the accused as "the gentleman 
on the other side." Juries were packed by 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 229 

the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all 
Orangemen were acquitted, all Catholics 
condemned, and the credit of the law lowered 
for both by a system which made the jury- 
man a tool and the prisoner a victim. It is 
strange that no honest man should have 
protested against such a use of his person 
and his creed. In the case of O'Connell the 
Chief Justice of England stated that the 
practice if not remedied must render trial by 
jury "a mockery, a delusion, and a snare"; 
but jury-packing with safe men remained 
the invariable custom till 1906. 

Nothing but evil to Ireland followed from 
carrying her affairs to an English parliament. 
The government refused the promised eman- 
cipation, refused tithe reform. Englishmen 
could not understand Irish conditions. The 
political economy they advocated for their 
own country had no relation to Ireland. The 
Irish members found themselves, as English 
officials had foretold in advocating the Union, 
a minority wholly without influence. Session 
after session, one complained, measures sup- 
ported by Irish members, which would have 
been hailed with enthusiasm by an Irish 



230 IRISH NATIONALITY 

parliament, were rejected by the English. 
Session after session measures vehemently 
resisted by the Irish members were forced on 
a reluctant nation by English majorities. 
When Ireland asked to be governed by the 
same laws as England, she was told the two 
countries were different and required different 
treatment. When she asked for any deviation 
from the English system, she was told that 
she must bow to the established laws and 
customs of Great Britain. The reports of 
royal commissions fell dead — such as that 
which in 1845 reported that the sufferings of 
the Irish, borne with exemplary patience, were 
greater than the people of any other country 
in Europe had to sustain. Nothing was done. 
Instead of the impartial calm promised at 
the Union, Ireland was made the battle-cry 
of English parties; and questions that con- 
cerned her life or death were important at 
Westminster as they served the exigencies of 
the government or the opposition. 

All the dangers of the Union were increased 
by its effect in drawing Irish landlords to 
London. Their rents followed them, and the 
wealth spent by absentees founded no indus- 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 231 

tries at home. A land system brought about 
by confiscation, and developed by absentees, 
meant unreclaimed wastes, lands half culti- 
vated, and neglected people. Landlords, said 
an indignant judge of wide experience in a 
charge to a jury in 1814, should build their 
tenants houses, and give them at least what 
they had not as yet, "the comforts of an 
English sow." To pay rent and taxes in 
England the toilers raised stores of corn and 
cattle for export there, from the value of 
eight million pounds in 1826 to seventeen 
million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so 
on. They grew potatoes to feed themselves. 
If the price of corn fell prodigiously — as at the 
end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing 
of the corn laws in England — the cheaper 
bread was no help to the peasants, most of 
whom could never afford to eat it; it only 
doubled their labour to send out greater ship- 
loads of provisions for the charges due in 
England. On the other hand, if potatoes 
rotted, famine swept over the country among 
its fields of corn and cattle. And when rent 
failed, summary powers of eviction were given 
at Westminster under English theories for use 



232 IRISH NATIONALITY 

in Ireland alone; "and if anyone would defend 
his farm it is here denominated rebellion." 
Families were flung on the bogs and mountain 
sides to live on wild turnips and nettles, 
to gather chickweed, sorrel, and seaweed, 
and to sink under the fevers that followed 
vagrancy, starvation, cold, and above all the 
broken hearts of men hunted from their 
homes. In famine time the people to save 
themselves from death were occasionally 
compelled to use blood taken from live bul- 
locks, boiled up with a little oatmeal; and 
the appalling sight was seen of feeble women 
gliding across the country with their pitchers, 
actually trampling upon fertility and fatness, 
to collect in the corner of a grazier's farm for 
their little portion of blood. Five times 
between 1822 and 1837 there were famines 
of lesser degree: but two others, 1817 and 
1847, were noted as among the half-dozen 
most terrible recorded in Europe and Asia 
during the century. From 1846 to 1848 over 
a million lay dead of hunger, while in a year 
food-stuffs for seventeen million pounds were 
sent to England. English soldiers guarded 
from the starving the fields of corn and the 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 233 

waggons that carried it to the ports; herds 
of cattle were shipped, and skins of asses 
which had served the famishing for food. 
New evictions on an enormous scale followed 
the famine, the clearance of what was then 
called in the phrase of current English 
economics "the surplus population," "the 
overstock tenantry." They died, or fled in 
hosts to America — Ireland pouring out on 
the one side her great stores or "surplus 
food," on the other her "surplus people," 
for whom there was nothing to eat. In the 
twenty years that followed the men and 
women who had fled to America sent back 
some thirteen millions to keep a roof over the 
heads of the old and the children they had left 
behind. It was a tribute for the landlords' 
pockets — a rent which could never have been 
paid from the land they leased. The loans 
raised for expenditure on the Irish famine 
were charged by England on the Irish taxes 
for repayment. 

No Irish parliament, no matter what its 
constitution, could have allowed the country 
to drift into such irretrievable ruin. O'Con- 
nell constantly protested that rather than the 



234 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Union he would have the old Protestant 
parliament. "Any body would serve if only 
it is in Ireland," cried a leading Catholic 
nationalist in Parnell's time; "the Protestant 
synod would do." In the despair of Ireland, 
the way was flung open to public agitation, and 
to private law which could only wield the 
weapons of the outlaw. AU methods were 
tried to reach the distant inattention of 
England. There were savage outbursts of 
men often starving and homeless, always on 
the edge of famine — Levellers, Threshers, and 
the like; or Whiteboys who were in fact a vast 
trades union for the protection of the Irish 
peasantry, to bring some order and equity into 
relations of landlord and tenant. Peaceful 
organisation was tried; the Catholic Associ- 
ation for Emancipation founded by O'Connell 
in 1823, an open society into which Protest- 
ants and Catholics alike were welcomed, kept 
the peace in Ireland for five years; outrage 
ceased with its establishment and revived with 
its destruction. His Association for Repeal 
(1832-1844) again lifted the people from law- 
less insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm 
of citizens for justice. A Young Ireland move- 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 235 

ment (1842-1848) under honoured names such 
as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Ga- 
van Duffy and Smith O'Brien and others with 
them, sought to destroy sectarian divisions, 
to spread a new hterature, to recover Irish 
history, and to win self-government, land 
reform, and education for a united people of 
Irish and English, Protestant and Catholic. 
The suppression of O'Connell's peaceful 
movement by the government forced on vio- 
lent counsels; and ended in the rising of Smith 
O'Brien as the only means left him of calling 
attention to the state of the country. The 
disturbances that followed have left their 
mark in the loop-holed police barracks that 
covered Ireland. There was a Tenant League 
(1852) and a North and South League. All 
else failing, a national physical force party was 
formed; for its name this organization went 
back to the dawn of Irish historic life — to the 
Fiana, those Fenian national militia vowed 
to guard the shores of Ireland. The Fenians 
(1865) resisted outrage, checked agrarian 
crime, and sought to win self-government by 
preparing for open war. A great constitu- 
tionalist and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, 



236 IRISH NATIONALITY 

led a peaceful parliamentary movement for 
Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles 
Stewart Parnell fought in the same cause for 
fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with 
victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, fol- 
lowing the advice of Lalor thirty years be- 
fore, founded a Land League (1879) to be 
inevitably merged in the wider national issue. 
Wave after wave of agitation passed over the 
island. The manner of the national struggle 
changed, peaceful or violent, led by Protestant 
or Catholic, by men of English blood or of 
Gaelic, but behind all change lay the fixed 
purpose of Irish self-government. For thirty- 
five years after the Union Ireland was ruled 
for three years out of every four by laws giv- 
ing extraordinary powers to the government; 
and in the next fifty years (1835-1885) there 
were only three without coercion acts and 
crime acts. By such contrasts of law in the 
two countries the Union made a deep sever- 
ance between the islands. 

In these conflicts there was not now, as 
there had never been in their history, a reli- 
gious war on the part of Irishmen. The 
oppressed people were of one creed, and the 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 237 

administration of the other. Protestant and 
Catholic had come to mean ejector and 
ejected, the armed Orangeman and the dis- 
armed peasants the agent- or clergy-magis- 
trate and the broken tenant before his too 
partial judgment-seat. In all cases where 
conflicting classes are divided into two creeds, 
religious incidents will crop up, or will be 
forced up, to embitter the situation; but the 
Irish struggle was never a religious war. 

Another distinction must be noted. Though 
Ireland was driven to the "worst form of 
civil convulsion, a war for the means of sub- 
sistence," there was more Irish than the 
battle for food. Those who have seen the 
piled up graves round the earth where the first 
Irish saints were laid, will know that the 
Irishman, steeped in his national history, had 
in his heart not his potato plot alone, but the 
thought of the home of his fathers, and in 
the phrase of Irish saints, "the place of his 
resurrection." 

If we consider the state of the poor, and 
the position of the millions of Irishmen who 
had been long shut out from any share in 
public affairs, and forbidden to form popular 



238 IRISH NATIONALITY 

conventions, we must watch with amazement 
the upspringing under O'Connell of the old 
idea of national self-government. Deep in 
their hearts lay the memory carried down by 
bards and historians of a nation whose law 
had been maintained in assemblies of a willing 
people. In O'Connell the Irish found a 
leader who had like themselves inherited the 
sense of the old Irish tradition. To escape 
English laws against gatherings and conven- 
tions of the Irish, O'Connell's associations had 
to be almost formless, and perpetually shifting 
in manner and in name. His methods would 
have been wholly impossible without a rare 
intelligence in the peasantry. Local gather- 
ings conducted by voluntary groups over the 
country; conciliation courts where justice 
was carried out apart from the ordinary courts 
as a protest against their corruption; monster 
meetings organised without the slightest dis- 
order; voluntary suppression of crime and 
outrage — in these we may see not merely an 
astonishing popular intelligence, but the 
presence of an ancient tradition. At the first 
election in which the people resisted the right 
of landlords to dictate their vote (1826), a 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 239 

procession miles in length streamed into 
Waterford in military array and unbroken 
tranquillity. They allowed no rioting, and 
kept their vow of total abstinence from 
whisky during the election. A like public 
virtue was shown in the Clare election two 
years later (1828) when 30,000 men camped in 
Ennis for a week, with milk and potatoes dis- 
tributed to them by their priests, all spirits 
renounced, and the peace not broken once 
throughout the week. As O'Connell drew 
towards Limerick and reached the Stone 
where the broken Treaty had been signed, 
50,000 men sent up their shout of victory at 
this peaceful redeeming of the violated pledges 
of 1690. In the Repeal meetings two to four 
hundred thousand men assembled, at Tara 
and other places whose fame was in the heart 
of every Irishman there, and the spirit of the 
nation was shown by a gravity and order 
which allowed not a single outrage. National 
hope and duty stirred the two millions who in 
the crusade of Father Mathew took the vow 
of temperance. 

In the whole of Irish history no time 
brought such calamity to Ireland as the 



240 IRISH NATIONALITY 

Victorian age. "I leave Ireland," said one, 
"like a corpse on the dissecting table." "The 
Celts are gone," said Englishmen, seeing the 
endless and disastrous emigration. "The 
Irish are gone, and gone with a vengeance." 
That such people should carry their intermi- 
nable discontent to some far place seemed to 
end the trouble. "Now for the first time these 
six hundred years," said The Times, "England 
has Ireland at her merey, and can deal with 
her as she pleases." But from this death 
Ireland rose again. Thirty years after 
O'Connell Parnell took up his work. He 
used the whole force of the Land League 
founded by Davitt to relieve distress and fight 
for the tenants' rights; but he used the land 
agitation to strengthen the National move- 
ment. He made his meaning clear. What 
did it matter, he said, who had possession of 
a few acres, if there was no National spirit to 
save the country; he would never have taken 
off his coat for anything less than to make a 
nation. In his fight he held the people as 
no other man had done, not even O'Connell. 
The conflict was steeped in passion. In 1881 
the government asked for an act giving them 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 241 

power to arrest without trial all Irishmen 
suspected of illegal projects — a power beyond 
all coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed 
a coercion act in 1833 for nineteen nights; 
Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights. 
Parliament had become the keeper of Irish 
tyrannies, not of her liberties, and its con- 
ventional forms were less dear to Irishmen 
than the freedom of which it should be the 
guardian. He was suspended, with thirty- 
four Irish members, and 303 votes against 
46 carried a bill by which over a thousand 
Irishmen were imprisoned at the mere will of 
the Castle, among them Parnell himself. The 
passion of rage reached its extreme height 
with the publication in The Times (1888) of 
a facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his 
consent to a paid system of murder and out- 
rage. A special commission found it to be a 
forgery. 

With the rejection of Gladstone's Home 
Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, and with the 
death of Parnell (1891), Irish nationalists 
were thrown into different camps as to the 
means to pursue, but they never faltered in 
the main purpose. That remains as firm as 



242 IRISH NATIONALITY 

in the times of O'Connell, Thomas Davis, 
John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once 
more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, 
while the whole Irish people, laying aside 
agitations and controversies, stand waiting 
to hear the end. 

The national movement had another side, 
the bringing back of the people to the land. 
The English parliament took up the question 
under pressure of violent agitation in Ireland. 
By a series of Acts the people were assured of 
fair rents and security from eviction. Ver- 
dicts of judicial bodies tended to prove that 
peasants were paying 60 per cent, above the 
actual value of the land. But the great Act 
of 1903 — a work inspired by an Irishman's 
intellect and heart — brought the final solu- 
tion, enabling the great mass of the tenants to 
buy their land by instalments. Thus the 
land war of seven hundred years, the war of 
kings and parliaments and planters, was 
brought to a dramatic close, and the soil of 
Ireland begins again to belong to her people. 

There was yet another stirring of the na- 
tional idea. In its darkest days the country 
had remained true to the old Irish spirit of 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 243 

learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In 
O'Connell's time the "poor scholar" who took 
his journey to "the Munster schools" was 
sent out with offerings laid on the parish 
altars by Protestants and Catholics alike; as 
he trudged with his bag of books and the fees 
for the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he 
was welcomed in every farm, and given of the 
best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord 
prosper him, and every one that has the heart 
set upon the learning." Bards and harpers 
and dancers wandered among the cottages. 
A famous bard Raftery, playing at a dance 
heard one ask, "Who is the musician .f^" and 
the blind fiddler answered him: 

"I am Raftery the poet. 
Full of hope and love. 
With eyes that have no light. 
With gentleness that has no misery. 

Going west upon my pilgrimage. 
Guided by the hght of my heart. 
Feeble and tired. 
To the end of my road. 

Behold me now. 
With my face to a wall, 
A-playing music 
To empty pockets." 

Unknown scribes still copied piously the 
national records. A Louth schoolmaster 



244 IRISH NATIONALITY 

could tell all the stars and constellations of 
heaven under the old Irish forms and names. 
A vision is given to us through a government 
Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger 
of knowledge, among the tillers and the ten- 
ants. In 1817 a dying farmer in Kilkenny 
repeated several times to his sons his descent 
back to the wars of 1641 and behind that to a 
king of Munster in 210 a.d. — directing the 
eldest never to forget it. This son took his 
brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to 
study in Dublin; in Kilkenny farmhouses he 
learned the old language and history of his 
race. At the same time another Irish boy, 
Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same old 
Munster stock, working on his father's farm 
in great poverty, learned from him much 
knowledge of Irish literature and music. The 
Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic univer- 
sity Ireland had seen since the wanderings 
of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan 
and O'Curry their opportunity, where they 
could meet learned men, and use their heredi- 
tary knowledge. A mass of material was laid 
up by their help. Passionate interest was 
shown by the people in the memorials of their 
ancient life- — giants' rings, cairns, and mighty 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION M5 

graves, the twenty-nine thousand mounds 
or moats that have been counted, the raths 
of their saints and scholars — each with its 
story Hving on the Kps of the people till the 
great famine and the death or emigration of 
the people broke that long tradition of the 
race. The cry arose that the survey was 
pandering to the national spirit. It was sud- 
denly closed (1837), the men dismissed, no 
materials published, the documents locked up 
in government offices. But for O'Donovan 
and O'Curry what prodigies of work remained. 
Once more the death of hope seemed to call 
out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, 
the fury of his intellectual zeal, the passion of 
his inheritance of learning. In the blackest 
days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan 
took up Michael O'Clery's work of two hun- 
dred years before, the Annals of the Four 
Masters, added to his manuscript the mass of 
his own learning, and gave to his people this 
priceless record of their country (1856). 
Among a number of works that cannot be 
counted here, he made a Dictionary which 
recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their 
language. O'Curry brought from his humble 



246 IRISH NATIONALITY 

training an incredible industry, great stores 
of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate 
skill as a scribe. All modern historians have 
dug in the mine of these men's work. They 
open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. 
Reeves and Dr. Todd, a new world of Irish 
history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833 
to give to readers of English the stories of Ire- 
land. George Petrie collected Irish music 
through all the west, over a thousand airs, 
and worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses 
and round towers. Lord Dunraven studied 
architecture, and is said to have visited every 
.barony in Ireland and nearly every island on 
the coast. 

These men were nearly all Protestants; 
they were all patriots. Potent Irish influences 
could have stirred a resident gentry and resi- 
dent parliament with a just pride in the great 
memorials of an Ireland not dead but still 
living in the people's heart. The failure of 
the hope was not the least of the evils of the 
Union. The drift of landlords to London had 
broken a national sympathy between them 
and the people, which had been steadily 
growing through the eighteenth century. 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 247 

Their sons no longer learned Irish, nor heard 
the songs and stories of the past. The brief 
tale of the ordnance survey has given us a 
measure of the intelligence that had been 
wasted or destroyed by neglect in Ireland. 
Archbishop Whately proposed to use the new 
national schools so as to make this destruc- 
tion systematic, and to put an end to national 
traditions. The child who knew only Irish 
was given a teacher who knew nothing but 
English; his history book mentioned Ireland 
twice only — a place conquered by Henry II., 
and made into an English province by the 
Union. The quotation "This is my own, my 
native land," was struck out of the reading- 
book as pernicious, and the Irish boy was 
taught to thank God for being "a happy 
English child." A Connacht peasant lately 
summed up the story: "I suppose the Famine 
and the National Schools took the heart out 
of the people." In fact famine and emigra- 
tion made the first great break in the Irish 
tradition that had been the dignity and con- 
solation of the peasantry; the schools com- 
pleted the ruin. In these, under English 
influence, the map of Ireland has been 



248 IRISH NATIONALITY 

rolled up, and silence has fallen on her 
heroes. 

Even out of this deep there came a revival. 
Whitley Stokes published his first Irish work 
the year after O' Curry's death; and has been 
followed by a succession of laborious students. 
Through a School of Irish Learning Dublin 
is becoming a national centre of true Irish 
scholarship, and may hope to be the leader 
of the world in this great branch of study. 
The popular Irish movement manifested it- 
self in the GaeHc League, whose branches 
now cover all Ireland, and which has been the 
greatest educator of the people since the time 
of Thomas Davis. Voluntary colleges have 
sprung up in every province, where earnest 
students learn the language, history, and 
music of their country; and on a fine day 
teacher and scholars gathered in the open 
air under a hedge recall the ancient Irish 
schools where brehon or chronicler led his 
pupils under a tree. A new spirit of self- 
respect, intelligence, and public duty has 
followed the work of the Gaelic League; it 
has united Catholic and Protestant, landlord 
and peasant. And through all creeds and 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 249 

classes a desire has quickened men to serve 
their country in its social and industrial 
life; and by Agricultural Societies, and 
Industrial Development Societies, to awaken 
again her trade and manufactures. 

The story is unfinished. Once again we 
stand at the close of another experiment of 
England in the government of Ireland. 
Each of them has been founded on the idea 
of English interests; each has lasted about a 
hundred years — "Tudor conquest," Planta- 
tions, an English parliament, a Union parlia- 
ment. All alike have ended in a disordered 
finance and a flight of the people from the 
land. 

Grattan foretold the failure of the Union 
and its cause. "As Ireland," he said, "is 
necessary to Great Britain, so is complete 
and perfect liberty necessary to Ireland, and 
both islands must be drawn much closer to 
a free constitution, that they may be drawn 
closer to one another." In England we have 
seen the advance to that freer constitution. 
The democracy has entered into larger 
liberties, and has brought new ideals. The 
growth of that popular life has been greatly 



250 IRISH NATIONALITY 

advanced by the faith of Ireland. Ever 
since Irish members helped to carry the 
Heform Acts they have been on the side of 
liberty, humanity, peace, and justice. They 
have been the most steadfast believers in 
constitutional law against privilege, and 
its most unswerving defenders. At West- 
minster they have always stood for hu- 
man rights, as nobler even than rights of 
property. What Chatham foresaw has come 
true: the Irish in the English parliament 
have been powerful missionaries of democ- 
racy. A freedom-loving Ireland has been con- 
quering her conquerors in the best sense. 

The changes of the last century have deeply 
affected men's minds. The broadening liber- 
ties of England as a free country, the demo- 
cratic movements that have brought new 
classes into government, the wider experience 
of imperial methods, the growing influence 
of men of good-will, have tended to change 
her outlook to Ireland. In the last genera- 
tion she has been forced to think more gravely 
of Irish problems. She has pledged her credit 
to close the land question and create a peasant 
proprietary. With any knowledge of Irish 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 251 

history the rehgious alarm, the last cry of 
prejudice, must inevitably disappear. The 
old notion of Ireland as the "property" of 
England, and of its exploitation for the ad- 
vantage of England, is falling into the past. 

A mighty spirit of freedom too has passed 
over the great Colonies and Dominions. 
They since their beginning have given shelter 
to outlawed Irishmen flying from despair at 
home. They have won their own pride of 
freedom, and have all formally proclaimed 
their judgment that Ireland should be 
allowed the right to shape her own govern- 
ment. The United States, who owe so much 
to Irishmen in their battle for independence, 
and in the labours of their rising prosperity, 
have supported the cause of Ireland for the 
last hundred years; ever since the first 
important meeting in New York to express 
American sympathy with Ireland was held 
in 1825, when President Jackson, of Irish 
origin, a Protestant, is said to have promised 
the first thousand dollars to the Irish eman- 
cipation fund. 

In Ireland itself we see a people that has 
now been given some first opportunities of 



252 IRISH NATIONALITY 

self-dependence and discipline under the new 
conditions of land ownership and of county 
government. We see too the breaking up 
of the old solid Unionist phalanx, the dying 
down of ancient fears, the decaying of old 
habits of dependence on military help from 
England, and a promise of revival of the 
large statesmanship that adorned the days 
of Kildare and of Grattan. It is singular to 
reflect that on the side of foreign domination, 
through seven hundred years of invasion 
and occupation, not a single man, Norman or 
English, warrior or statesman, has stood out 
as a hero to leave his name, even in England, 
on the lips or in the hearts of men. The 
people who were defending their homes 
and liberties had their heroes, men of every 
creed and of every blood, Gaelic, Norman, 
English, Anglican, Cathohc, and Presby- 
terian. Against the stormy back-ground of 
those prodigious conflicts, those immeasur- 
able sorrows, those thousand sites consecrated 
by great deeds, lofty figures emerge whom 
the people have exalted with the poetry of 
their souls, and crowned with love and grati- 
tude — the first martyr for Ireland of "the 



IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 253 

foreigners" Earl Thomas of Desmond, the 
soul of another Desmond wailing in the 
Atlantic winds, Kildare riding from his tomb 
on the horse with the silver shoes, Bishop 
Bedell, Owen Roe and Hugh O'Neill, Red 
Hugh O'Donnell, Sarsfield, Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett, O'Connell, 
Davis, Parnell — men of peace and men of 
war, but all lovers of a free nation. 

In memory of the long, the hospitable roll 
of their patriots, in memory of their long 
fidelities, in memory of their national faith, 
and of their story of honour and of suffering, 
the people of Ireland once more claim a 
government of their own in their native land, 
that shall bind together the whole nation 
of all that live on Irish soil, and create for 
all a common obligation and a common 
prosperity. An Irish nation of a double 
race will not fear to look back on Irish 
history. The tradition of that soil, so 
steeped in human passion, in joy and sorrow, 
still rises from the earth. It lives in the 
hearts of men who see in Ireland a ground 
made sacred by the rare intensity of human 
life over every inch of it, one of the richest 



254 IRISH NATIONALITY 

possessions that has ever been bequeathed 
by the people of any land whatever to the 
successors and inheritors of their name. The 
tradition of national life created by the Irish 
has ever been a link of fellowship between 
classes, races, and religions. The natural 
union approaches of the Irish Nation — the 
union of all her children that are born under 
the breadth of her skies, fed by the fatness 
of her fields, and nourished by the civilisa- 
tion of her dead. 



SOME IRISH WRITERS ON 
IRISH HISTORY 



Joyce, P. W. — Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2 vols. 
1903. This book gives a general survey of the old Irish 
civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political 
history. 

Ferguson, Sir Samuel. — Hibernian Nights' Entertainments. 
1906. These small volumes of stories are interesting as 
the effort of Sir S. Ferguson to give to the youth of his 
time an impression of the heroic character of their history. 

Green, A. S. — The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1200- 
1600) . 1909. An attempt is here made to bring together 
evidence, some of it unused before, of the activity of 
commerce and manufactures, and of learning, that pre- 
vailed in mediaeval Ireland, until the destruction of the 
Tudor wars. 

Mitchell, John. — Life and Times of Aodh O'Neill. 1868. A 
small book which gives a vivid picture of a great Irish hero, 
and of the later Elizabethan wars. 

Taylor, J. F.— Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is 
the best account of a very great Irishman; and gives the 
causes of the Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 
1650. 

Davis, Thomas.— The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A 
brief but important study of this Parliament. It illus- 
trates the Irish spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893. 

Bagwell, Richard. — Ireland under the Tudors and the 
Stuarts. 5 vols. 1885, 1910. A detailed account is given 
of the English policy from 1509 to 1660, from the point of 
view of the English settlement, among a people regarded 
as inferior, devoid of organisation or civilisation. 
255 



^5Q IRISH WRITERS 

Murray, A. E. — Commercial Relations between England and 
Ireland. 1903. A useful study is made here of the 
economic condition of Ireland from 1641/.under the legisla- 
tion of the English Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and 
the Union Parliament. 

Leckt, W. E. H. — History of Ireland in the Eighteenth 
Century. 5 vols. 1892. The study of the independent 
Parliament in Ireland is the most original work of this 
historian, and a contribution of the utmost importance 
to Irish history. Mr. Lecky did not make any special 
study of the Catholic peasantry. 

Two Centuries of Irish History (1691-1870). Introduction by 
Jambs Brtce. 1907. These essays, mostly by Irishmen, 
give in a convenient form the outlines of the history of the 
time. There is a brief account of O'ConneU. 

O'Brien, R. Barry. — Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. 1898. 
2 vols. This gives the best account of the struggle for 
Home Rule and the land agitation in the last half of the 
nineteenth century. 

D'Alton, E. a.— History of Ireland (1903-1910). 3 vols. 
This is the latest complete history of Ireland. 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



MAY 11 1911 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 342 053 7 



